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THE ADVANCE OF 
THE ENGLISH NOVEL 



BY 

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS 

Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale 
Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters 

Author of "Essays on Modern Novelists," 
"Essays ON Russian Novelists," etc. 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1916 



^^^"{6 



Copyright. 1915 

By DODD, mead AND COMPANY 

Copyright, 1916 

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. INC. 



I 



/ 



i'^ 



StP 20 1916 
©Cl.A43ti430 



>M7 ( 



To 
HENRY A. BEERS 



.7s- 



PEEFACE 

Of this book, all the chapters except the last 
appeared originally in the Bookman; the last 
was printed in the Yale Review for July 1916. 

My sketch of the advance of the novel in Eng- 
lish includes two centuries. I have laid the 
chief stress on recent and contemporary writers, 
although it has been impossible even to approach 
completeness of treatment. Many novelists are 
omitted that may seem important ; but the book 
is a record of personal impressions and opin- 
ions. I shall be glad if some individuals feel 
the pleasure of recognition, the pleasure of op- 
position, and a stimulus to further reading. 

W. L. P. 

Yale University, 
Tuesday, 23 May 1916 



vii 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Present State of the Novel 1 

II The Age of Anne — Defoe and Richardson . 27 

III Fielding, Smollett, Sterne 53 

IV Eighteenth Century Romances .... 79 
V The Mid- Victorians 104 

VI Romantic Revival, 189^1904 133 

VII Meredith and Hardy 163 

VIII Conrad, Galsworthy and Others . . . .192 

IX Twentieth Century British Novelists . . 232 

X Twentieth Century American Novelists . . 267 

XI Henry James 302 

Index 331 



THE ADVANCE OF 
THE ENGLISH NOVEL 



THE ADVANCE OF THE 
ENGLISH NOVEL 

CHAPTEE I 

PEESENT STATE OF THE NOVEL 

The present state of the novel — its immense popularity— r 
the rise in its respectability — definition of a good novel — 
the penalty of popularity — reasons for this popularity — 
books sold under false pretences — distinction between 
"romance" and "novel" — the philosophy underlying realism 
and romanticism — the strength of realism — the vicious circle 
in all art. 

The beginning of the twentieth century wit- 
nessed the predominance in literature of the 
novel. More copies of novels were in circula- 
tion than all other kinds of books put together. 
It took two centuries to bring about the consum- 
mation; and at this moment the novel is still 
supreme. Nothing threatens its hegemony ex- 
cept the growing vogue of the printed play, ac- 
companied as it has been by a blizzard of critical 
works on the stage. We cannot help noticing 

1 



2 THE ADVANCE OF 

how many professional novelists have become 
professional playwrights. Does this mean that 
the drama has really awakened at last, re- 
freshed by a sonnd sleep of three hundred 
years ? Does it mean that the dying prophecies 
of William Sharp and Bronson Howard are to 
become fact, and the next generation is to ex- 
press itself mainly in dramatic dialogue, as in 
the days of Elizabeth! Or is all this play-mak- 
ing simply one more florescence from the root 
of all evil? Has the same quick-return fever 
that has shaken the souls from so many bodies in 
business smitten the vast army of literary specu- 
lators with drama delirium? 

No accurate answers can yet be given to these 
questions; but to those professional students, 
critics and teachers of literature who are as 
eagerly interested in contemporary production 
as are teachers of science and economics, the lit- 
erary movements of the next twenty years are 
going to be well worth watching. Meanwhile 
the present proud height of the novePs popular- 
ity and influence makes an excellent platform for 
the observer ; he cannot only look about him ; he 



THE ENGLISH NOVEIJ 3 

has a fine chance to look back, and if he is men- 
tally alive, he cannot help looking forward. 

There are fashions in the array of thoughts 
as there are fashions in corporeal coverings; 
and as it wonld be a bold undertaking to explain 
the causes of the time-variations in the length of 
men's coats and the diameter of women's hats, 
so even the most philosophical historian cannot 
fully account for the occasional predominance of 
certain literary forms. Even some literary ma- 
terial actually vanishes ; scholastic speculation, 
that filled many folios, seems extinct. But the 
chief material of literature is human nature, 
which never changes; poets, dramatists, novel- 
ists, satirists focus their attention on ^* man's 
thoughts, and loves and hates. " It is the fash- 
ion of expression that varies ; it is rather inter- 
esting to reflect that not merely the mob of 
professional scribblers, who produce what to- 
day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, but 
inspired men of genius interpreted human life 
by means of the drama and the sonnet in 1600, 
by the heroic couplet in 1700 and by the novel in 
1900. Twentieth century publishers are not 



4 THE ADVANCE OF 

eagerly looking for theology in verse ; yet two 
hundred years ago theological poetry was a sure 
card. Pope's Essay on Man sold off as sen- 
sationally as Winston ChurchilPs The Inside 
of the Cup, Pope and Mr. Churchill had one 
thing in common besides success — an accurate 
flair for public taste. I dare say that Pope 
would be a clever realistic novelist were he alive 
to-day — for he would know his market now as he 
knew it then. In his time theological verse was 
so much in demand that Samuel Boyse, who 
usually wrote in bed, his frequent sprees giving 
the pawn-broker possession of his garments, 
composed a poem on the nature of the Deity, be- 
ing forced — ^unhappy artist — to produce some- 
thing that would sell. A similar predicament 
would to-day drive his energies into a quite dif- 
ferent channel. Boyse 's poetry is read no 
more; and he would have followed his works 
were it not that Dr. Johnson liked him and used 
to go about collecting sixpences to redeem his 
clothes, thus giving temporary decency to his 
body and immortality to his name. The reading 
public in those days was patrician ; in the latter 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 5 

half of the nineteenth century, when the ability 
to read ceased to be any more of a distinction 
than the ability to breathe, the novel reached 
the climax of popularity. For the novel is the 
most democratic form of literature, easily 
adaptable to minds of high, low and no intel- 
ligence. 

The extraordinary popularity of the novel 
toward the close of the nineteenth century is 
proved by its sudden conquest of the American 
stage. The relation between acted play and 
published romance that had been one of the 
most notable features in Elizabethan literature 
again came into being — with just the opposite 
emphasis and for a totally different reason. 
The Elizabethan dramatists — except Ben Jon- 
son — did not dream of inventing their plots; 
their business, as some one has said, was not 
creation, but translation. They hunted for 
plots, not in their own brain, but in contempo- 
rary fiction ; they selected a story, adapted it for 
the stage, and in many cases gave it permanent 
beauty. The only reason why many Eliza- 
bethan prose romances are still read is because 



6 THE ADVANCE OF 

Shakespeare glorified them by his genius ; Tol- 
stoi being the only person who has maintained 
that the originals were better than the dramas. 
The playwrights took this material, not because 
it was popular, but because it was convenient ; 
and the custom lapsed with the extinction of the 
Elizabethan stage. It was resumed, however, 
in 1894; and for ten years flourished mightily, 
being finally killed by the American sense of 
humour. Two prodigiously popular novels ap- 
peared in 1894: Trilby and The Prisoner 
of Zenda. They were quickly transferred to 
the stage, where thousands of people greeted 
the incarnation of their favourite characters 
with childish delight. The * ' dramatised novel ' ' 
became a fad; every **best seller'' was certain 
to take dramatic form, not because it contained 
germs, of drama but because it was the thing 
everybody was talking about. Each theatre 
manager in New York employed men who 
made dramas with scissors and paste; and one 
director said frankly that the natural adapta- 
bility of the particular novel had nothing to do 
with the case so long as it was popular ; he had 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 7 

a man on a salary wlio had become so skilful 
that he could make a play out of the city direc- 
tory, were there any demand for it. It is sel- 
dom in the history of literature that the popu- 
larity of a certain form becomes so extensive 
as to conquer another form with which it has 
really almost nothing in common; in this in- 
stance the drama for a decade became the slave 
of the novel ; and the fact is worth recording as 
showing the triumphant vogue of the latter. 

The advance of the novel in popularity was 
accompanied by an automatic rise in respecta- 
bility. A hundred years ago novel reading was 
thought by many to be positively wicked, classed 
with that unholy trinity — cards, dancing, stage- 
plays. The mother of Thomas Carlyle read 
only one novel in her life, Goethe's Wilhelm 
Meister; and she read that because her son 
had translated it, the best of all reasons, from a 
maternal point of view, for making an excep- 
tion. Could Goethe by any possibility have 
imagined in the course of its composition that it 
would be read by such a woman? Yet John 
Carlyle wrote to his brother Thomas: ^^She is 



8 THE ADVANCE OF 

sitting here as if under some charm, reading 
Meister, and has nearly got through the sec- 
ond volume. Though we are often repeating 
honest Hall Foster's denouncement against 
readers of * novels/ she still continues to perse- 
vere. She does not relish the character of the 
women, and especially of Philina : ^ They are so 
wanton.' She cannot well tell what it is that 
interests her." Indeed, from Jane Austen to 
Henry James, responsible novelists were on the 
defensive. In the fifth chapter of Northanger 
Abbey we are told that two girls : 

shut themselves up to read novels together. Yes, 
novels ; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and im- 
politic custom, so common with novel writers, of de- 
grading, by their contemptuous censure, the very per- 
formances to the number of which they are them- 
selves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in 
bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and 
scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own 
heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is 
sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. . . . 
Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effu- 
sions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new 
novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with 
which the press now groans. Let us not desert one 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 9 

another — ^we are an injured body. Although our pro- 
ductions have afforded more extensive and unaffected 
pleasure than those of any other literary corporation 
in the world, no species of composition has been so 
much decried. From pride, ignorance or fashion, our 
foes are almost as many as our readers; and while 
the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the 
History of England, or of the man who collects and 
publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, 
Pope and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator and 
a chapter from Sterne, are eulogised by a thousand 
pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying 
the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novel- 
ist, and of slighting the performances which have 
only genius, wit and taste to recommend them. . . . 

''And what are you reading. Miss V ''Oh, it 

is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she 
lays down her book with affected indifference, or mo- 
mentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or 
Belinda^' ; or, in short, only some work in which the 
greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which 
the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the 
happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effu- 
sions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world 
in the best-chosen language. 

Twenty-five years ago Henry James thought 
it necessary to insist on the "dignity'' of the 
novel. The best novelists are really historians, 



10 THE ADVANCE OF 

and the novel is history. Or, if one is unaf- 
fected by the challenge of truth, Mr. James 
pleaded for the worth of the novel in art. He 
declared that a picture was not expected to apol- 
ogise for itself, why should the novel? Our 
Canadian contemporary, Mr. Leacock, who is a 
professor of political economy, rather indig- 
nantly denies the supposition that his humor- 
ous extravaganzas are the offshoots of leisure 
hours. Quite the contrary he affirms to be true, 
saying that any one can consult columns of sta- 
tistics and rearrange them, but to write a work 
of pure imagination requires a much higher 
quality of mind and much more serious effort. 

When I was a child my mother would not per- 
mit me to read novels on Sunday ; and yet, some 
thirty years after that period, I received a letter 
from a woman who was very old, a bed-ridden 
invalid, and the widow of a Baptist minister 
(the three qualifications are not arranged as a 
climax); she wrote, *' Thank the Lord for 
novels ! ' ' 

If one indulges in a little analysis, one sees 
that the respectability of the novel was naturally 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 11 

forced to rise with its popularity — not because 
of a more general liberality in pleasures, a 
weakening of the consciousness of sin, an in- 
creased flippancy in all life 's habits and conven- 
tions ; no, the rise in respectability came for just 
the opposite reason. When any literary form 
is predominant, the majority of writers are com- 
pelled to write in that form, simply because it is 
the surest way to secure the two things that 
nearly every writer wants — fame and cash. 
The supremacy of Elizabethan drama forced 
most of the great writers of that age to put their 
ideas and imaginings into the dramatic form; 
which is one reason why the Elizabethan drama 
is so wonderful as poetry and so wretched as 
drama. Of all those towering men of genius, 
Shakespeare alone holds the stage to-day, and 
only a small fraction of his plays are commonly 
acted. 

During the last years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the novel became so popular that many 
professional writers chose that method of ex- 
pression, whether they had any natural love for 
it or not, and even when they were totally ignor- 



12 THE ADVANCE OF 

ant of the novel as an art form. All over tlie 
world thoughtful authors joined the ever-swell- 
ing ranks of the novelists. The result was, of 
course, that serious readers, men and women 
who were determined to read works that re- 
flected the great movements in modern thought, 
were compelled to read novels^ Clubs were 
organised all over the country to study contem- 
porary fiction, courses on the novel in college 
curricula ceased to attract outside attention, 
and critical works on the subject multiplied 
abundantly. 

This vast popularity of the novel was and is 
by no means an unmixed blessing. Indeed, with 
reference purely to the art of fiction — a great 
and noble art — it has been fraught with disaster. 
If I were forced to make a definition, I should 
define a high-class novel in five words — a good 
story well told. How rarely do we find a per- 
fect illustration! The number of people who 
are seeking in the welter of contemporary books 
to find *^good stories'' — stories that shall at 
once be interesting, charming, clever, decent, 
and that shall not be treatises on politics, re- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 13 

ligion or sociology — the number of such earnest 
seekers after amusement is pathetic. They 
want entertainment, and what are they doing? 
Many are turning from ^^ novels" to history, 
biography, letters and essays to find it. Every 
man and woman with any pretension at all to a 
knowledge of literature is constantly besieged 
with this question: '* Where can I find a really 
good story?" 

For if a true novel be a good story well told, 
it is certain that the majority of so-called novels 
are not stories at all: of the saving remnant, 
only a few are good stories : and still fewer are 
well told. The great bulk of modern fiction may 
be divided into two classes — those that are 
merely rambling accounts of the lives of unin- 
teresting characters, and those that are treatises 
on aspects of modern thought. Among the 
*^best sellers" of the past thirty years only a 
small number could possibly be classified as 
artistic novels. Edward Bellamy was deeply 
interested in socialism, and its earnest advocate 
as well ; in 1860 he would perhaps have written 
a tract embodying his arguments, but coming at 



14 THE ADVANCE OF 

a later time, he called his treatise a novel, and 
named it Looking Backward. Mrs. Ward has 
never written a novel in her life, and only once 
came near it, in David Grieve. But she is a 
serious, earnest, thoughtful, deeply read woman, 
with a passion to improve the world: she once 
wrote a treatise on religious reform, and called 
it Robert Elsmere. As people are more inter- 
ested in religion than in any other subject in the 
world save two, her book had a prodigious suc- 
cess — exactly paralleled a short time ago by 
Winston Churchiirs The Inside of the Cup. 
For many months after the day of its publica- 
tion this work was selling at the rate of five 
hundred copies a day; yet, with the possible 
exception of the curate, there was not a living 
character in the book, there was no real story, 
and none of the charm of fiction. But there 
was a timely and earnest discussion of the mod- 
ern creed and the modern work of the church, 
with a plea for liberalism. Suppose one is in- 
terested in the question — Have we a right to kill 
our friends when they are suffering acutely from 
a hopeless disease? — one may be referred to 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 15 

Edith Wharton ^s work on the subject, called 
The Fruit of the Tree, The fact that in this 
particular instance the woman who did kill her 
friend to save her from suffering subsequently 
married the friend's husband, is merely a mat- 
ter of detail, and should not be permitted to 
distract our attention from the main theme. 
All of these ^^ novels'' remind me of the way I 
was once decoyed by a Sunday school book. I 
looked over the catalogue, and my youthful at- 
tention was arrested by the title Putnam and 
the Wolf. Thinking I should witness a rattling 
good fight, I drew out the book, and in the calm 
of the Sunday afternoon began to read. This 
was the first sentence: ^^As General Putnam 
descended into the cave to fight with the fierce 
and savage wolf, so should we all struggle with 
the demon of intemperance." And there was 
not a further allusion to either Putnam or the 
wolf in the entire work. ** Money under false 
pretences" is a mild term for such literary dex- 
terity; but it can now be paralleled in every 
publisher's list of forthcoming works of fiction. 
The production of literature and the various 



16 THE ADVANCE OF 

forms that it assumes are, of course, chiefly 
governed by our old friend in the study of 
political economy— the law of supply and de- 
mand. "What, then, has caused the sharp de- 
mand for novels which has made the supply in- 
crease in a cumulative progression since 1850, 
and which accounts for such a vast body of 
essays, sermons, theses, arguments, scientific 
treatises, masquerading as works of fiction ? It 
is, I think, the enormous increase of high 
schools. Formerly the number of people for 
whom reading was either a refuge or a stimula- 
tion was comparatively small ; toward the close 
of the nineteenth century millions of people 
discovered the pleasure or the anaesthetic of 
books. I do not refer to college professors, 
ministers, journalists, etc., who make their liv- 
ing by reading books and then writing or speak- 
ing about them; no, I mean people engaged in 
useful occupations, who work hard during the 
day, and who read anywhere from six to fifteen 
hours a week for pleasure. Most of these read 
for a mental change of air, for rest, relaxation, 
for refuge from sorrow, for relief from care. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 17 

possibly to get to sleep o' nigMs— this vast 
army of readers demand, of course, something 
entertaining, something that can be guaranteed 
to divert the mind; and the novel has risen by 
leaps and bounds to satisfy this particular 
daughter of the horse-leech. 

It is somewhat unfortunate, in discussing the 
history of English prose fiction, that we cannot 
make a sharp distinction between the words 
** romance '' and ''novel." We ought to mean 
by ''romance" a story where the chief interest 
lies, not in the characters, but in the events ; as, 
for example, Quentin Durward, By the word 
"novel" we should denote a story where the 
principal stress falls, not on the succession of 
incidents, but on the development of the char- 
acters; an excellent illustration would be The 
Mill on the Floss, Occasionally a man of gen- 
ius has made a splendidly successful fusion of 
the two, as in Thackeray's Henry Esmond — 
which, if a secret ballot could be taken, might 
possibly be voted the greatest work of fiction 
in the English language. In 1785, at the flood- 
tide of the English Komantic Movement, Clara 



18 THE ADVANCE OF 

Eeeve attempted to draw a distinction between 
the two words: ^' The novel is a picture of 
real life and manners, and of the times in which 
it is written. The romance, in lofty and ele- 
vated language, describes what never happened 
nor is likely to happen. The novel gives a 
familiar relation of such things as pass every 
day before our eyes, such as may happen to our 
friend or to ourselves.'' It will be observed 
that her distinction is not the same as the one 
I have suggested as desirable. I do not think 
the main difference should be one of style, nor 
do I think romances should include only those 
works which deal with fantastic or impossible 
adventures; for such a nomenclature would 
leave no place at all for those works of fiction 
that deal with historical events and personages 
in a manner that is meant to be scrupulously 
accurate. Such works, according to Clara 
Eeeve, and all historians who follow her, could 
not possibly be either romances or novels. 
"What are they, then? 

When one considers such difficulties as these, 
one is, after all, reconciled to the generally pre- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 1& 

vailing loose use of the word ** novel/' which 
means simply any work of prose fiction. Defi- 
nitions are dangerous ; no sooner have you got 
your definition stated in a manner that appears 
to you sound and unassailable than some awk- 
ward questioner will want to know what you are 
going to do with such and such a concrete in- 
stance, which most certainly exists, and which 
refuses to conform to your artificially made 
standard. Creative writers are more interested 
in the inherent truth and beauty of their com- 
positions than they are in their possible classi- 
fication under established forms. A man who 
writes for the stage does not care very much 
if all the critics refuse to call his composition 
a play so long as the theatre is packed night 
after night and audiences are spellbound. It 
is better to have it indefinable and impressive 
than to have it a perfect illustration of the 
rules without the breath of life. 

Still we can, I think, by remembering that ro- 
mances contain incident and novels analysis, find 
such a distinction useful. One of the greatest 
of all English romances is Lorna Doone; and 



20 THE ADVANCE OP 

its author, in his original preface, remarked: 
**This work is called a ^romance,' because the 
incidents, characters, time and scenery are alike 
romantic. And in shaping this old tale the 
writer neither dares nor desires to claim for 
it the dignity or cumber it with the difficulty 
of an historic novel. ' ' There you have the real 
essence of romanticism — liberty. The roman- 
tic drama and the romantic story are essentially 
free — free of all rules, and not to be measured 
precisely by canons of criticism or standards 
of fact. Mr. Blackmore did not care to verify 
any statement or any person in his work; but 
he meant to write, and did write, a good story, 
a genuine romance. For Lorna Doone is surely 
a romance, as Barchester Towers is surely a 
novel. 

For my part, as a tireless and catholic reader 
of fiction, I do not much care whether I read 
romances or novels. I have never had any of 
Mr. Howells's contempt for romance. I have 
more contempt for a badly written realistic 
novel than I have for a well-executed, wildly 
exciting romance. I had rather hear a good 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 21 

melodrama than a stupid play founded on fact. 
But the theories underlying romantic and real- 
istic fiction are diametrically opposed, and 
might be compared to two opposite methods of 
treating a hospital ^^case.'' The romanticist 
and the realist agree that all men and women, 
no matter how apparently healthy, are suffer- 
ing from an incurable disease — life. In addi- 
tion to being doomed — every one of us — ^most 
of us are not any too comfortable in our pro- 
longed illness. Our days are filled with small 
aches and pains, little vexations, frustrated 
hopes, with every now and then a calamity or a 
disaster of serious magnitude. Our appear- 
ance, ability and resources during the progress 
of our disease are just ordinary, without any 
positively striking characteristic. The world is 
made up of average men and women, whose 
lives are filled with trivial events. Your real- 
ist is a homeopath; because persons and hap- 
penings are for the most part commonplace, 
novels should be the same ; they should exhibit 
commonplace people, and extraordinary inci- 
dents should be barred. Let all novel readers 



22 THE ADVANCE OF 

find the truth of life accurately reflected in art, 
and art will be a real antiseptic. Your roman- 
ticist, while agreeing in the diagnosis, insists 
on an absolutely opposite remedy. Because life 
is rather stupid and commonplace, art should be 
just the contrary. Novels should save us from 
ourselves, by taking us into a refreshingly dif- 
ferent world. Romances should act on our 
nerves exactly as a change of air — to borrow 
Stevenson's phrase — acts on the bodily health. 
"Without the slightest jar in the transit, we 
escape from our environment, meet marvel- 
lously strong men and radiantly beautiful 
women, who, after passing through thrilling 
adventures, reach a paradise of wedded love. 
The novelist remoulds the sorry scheme of 
things nearer to the heart's desire. We re- 
turn to the daily task refreshed in spirit, with 
the blessed knowledge that the first half-hour 
of leisure can take us back to the world of 
beauty. 

While the philosophies underlying realism 
and romanticism are thus diametrically in op- 
position, it must be confessed that, however 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 23 

alluring and diverting the field of romance may 
be, the realist makes in the end a deeper and 
more lasting impression on the mind. Sup- 
pose, for example, Blackmore had supplied a 
different ending to Lorna Doone, as some mis- 
guided critics would have preferred. It will 
be remembered that at the wedding in the tiny 
church Carver slips in with a gun and shoots 
the bride; she lingers for a page and a half, 
and recovers. Now, suppose she had suc- 
cumbed. The reader would doubtless have 
wept; then shortly have dried his tears with 
the sound reflection that all this never hap- 
pened, and that it is silly to weep over the fate 
of even so attractive a girl as Lorna, since she 
never existed. We come to ourselves at the 
end of a sad romance, as we leave the opera 
house after the curtain of Konigskinder to eat 
a good supper, or as we awake from a horrible 
dream, and hear the reassuring trolley car go 
by. But the effect brought by a realistic novel 
cannot be thus summarily blotted out; in fact, 
it cannot be blotted out at all, except by the 
slow and unconscious method of forgetting it. 



24 THE ADVANCE OF 

Wlien one finishes Esther Waters, one cannot 
say, *^ Pshaw, this is all a dream!'' because it 
is not a dream, and we feel certain that the 
selected cases are accurately typical of mil- 
lions. 

Every sincere novelist, poet and dramatist 
hopes that his created illusion will endure ; all 
have a well-founded fear of importunate facts 
of life that may erase the impression made by 
the eloquence of art. The dramatist wishes 
that between the acts the audience would remain 
in their seats, discussing the probabilities of the 
next act in awestruck whispers ; but the women 
indulge in social gossip and the men adjourn 
for a drink. In August, 1914, every novelist 
was angry with the war ; he would rather have 
the little groups of casual acquaintances talk- 
ing excitedly about the one thing most impor- 
tant to him. Even in the absence of journal- 
istic sensations, life is always the ruthless 
enemy of art; the novelist fears the bridge 
party, the dramatist fears the oysters and 
champagne. So the teacher fears the football 
game which is imminent, and the fiery preacher 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 25 

the soggy Sunday dinner, which will stupefy 
the audience he has momentarily awakened to 
a sense of spiritual values. Art loses much in 
a vicious circle; the singers cannot be sup- 
ported without the boxes, and the boxes do not 
always respond to the singer's soul, and they 
are often empty during the early and during 
the late portions of the great opera. The faith- 
ful gallery has the thrills, but lacks the cash. 
The West End dramatist is the one who reaps 
the harvest of gold ; and his plays are supported 
by grown-up children and must be modelled to 
their necessities. For although God never 
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, the artist 
finds it expedient to do so. The novelist may 
aim his work at the highest intelligence ; but the 
highest intelligence borrows or reads the book 
in a public library, adding nothing to the 
author's royalties. If it is to make an imme- 
diate fortune for him, he must perhaps com- 
promise with his soul. If it is to be published 
in a limited and beautiful edition, it will be 
owned by those who will never cut the leaves. 
The greatest portrait painter cannot always 



26 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

select interesting faces; lie is doomed to paint 
those who have his price. 

This fear of indifference, frivolity, lack of 
response on the part of those by whom the work 
of art is made possible has afflicted many a 
creative genius. At the very beginning of Pere 
Goriot Balzac roared in his reader ^s face: 
**This drama is neither fiction nor romance. 
It is so true that each one can recognise its 
elements in his own home; yes, perchance in 
his own heart. ' ' 

Everything works together for evil against 
art. The only possible salvation is sincerity. 
The duration and depth of the impression made 
by a realistic novel are both in direct proportion 
to its approximation to reality; whether the 
reality be in the events, in the characters, or 
in both. 



CHAPTEE II 

THE AGE OF ANNE 

Modem realism in the age of Anne — modem English 
prose style — the parents of the English novel — Daniel Defoe 
and his realistic romances — the style of Gulliver's Travels — 
the three ways of telling a story — Richardson and the 
psychological novel. 

The men of Queen Anne brouglit prose fiction 
from heaven or hell to earth, and gave us the 
novel. Of all centuries, the eighteenth holds 
the primacy as the Century of Beginnings ; and 
perhaps for this reason we of the twentieth 
have a higher regard for it than the Victorians 
expressed. During the fifteen years of the 
present epoch, there has been a noticeable re- 
habilitation of the eighteenth century; so that 
it already seems strange to remember that sixty 
years ago *^the age of prose and reason'' stood 
low in public esteem. We know now that the 
English Augustans, with all their limitations, 
had a sense of fact that is worth having. Their 

27 



28 THE ADVANCE OF 

world was a real world, and they made the best 
of it. Its pleasures were real, its pains were 
real ; and when they spoke of the comforts and 
social delights of urban life, they knew exactly 
what they were talking about. They were like 
the Parisians ; in all spheres of art, they rated 
cerebration higher than passion. They hated 
mystery and enthusiasm as being somehow 
symptomatic of a sloven and unkempt mind; 
they loved clarity, regularity, and the restraint 
that accompanies good breeding. The reaction 
against the Puritan religious excesses of the 
imagination was still powerful ; and the weari- 
some sectarian controversies of the seventeenth 
century had developed a kind of polite scepti- 
cism, which took the shape of a general con- 
formity to the Church of England. This earth 
was good enough, without supersensual specu- 
lation ; and the best thing in this earth was Lon- 
don. They took the cash, and let the credit go. 
One reason why Queen Anne literature is so 
clear is because it isn't deep. Writers avoided 
difficult themes, and confined themselves to sub- 
jects entirely within the range of limited minds. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 29 

These men were all realists, wliether they wrote 
verse or prose — Addison, Swift, Pope, Steele, 
Defoe, Prior, Gay, Parnell, Arbuthnot — they 
looked down and not np. It was an age of 
criticism; and while it is not always true that 
poetry is a criticism of life, the novel most cer- 
tainly is. It was by no accident that the novel 
was born at that time. Those intensely mod- 
ern, sophisticated, clear-headed folk, with a 
dominant sense of fact, had precisely the right 
equipment to produce realistic fiction.. This 
is shown by the astounding result — ^the first 
three English novelists will rank for all time 
in the highest class. In the English novel there 
is no early development from crudity to perfec- 
tion, from simple to complex; the thing began 
with an immortal masterpiece. 

The history of literature is full of paradoxes. 
English literature is instinctively and prima- 
rily romantic, as French literature is not. Yet 
every attempt of the English — from Morte 
d' Arthur in 1485 to Waverley in 1814 — to pro- 
duce a prose romance, was an ignominious fail- 
ure. It is an extraordinary fajct, that with the 



30 THE ADVANCE OF 

single and glorious exception of Malory ^s Morte 
d^ Arthur, tliere is not one work of prose fiction 
in English up to the time of Defoe that is worth 
the time and attention of the general reader. 
For I certainly would not read, nor advise any 
one to read Eupliues, Arcadia, Rosalind, Jack 
Wilton, or Oroonoho, for their intrinsic value. 
The fact that most of those works were once 
**best sellers'' has not saved them; they live 
now only in their historical significance. 

The novel, next to the realistic play, is the 
most concrete and ^* natural'' form of litera- 
ture ; and it did not appear until there was an 
adequate medium of expression. A simple, 
flexible, smooth-running English prose style did 
not exist until the latter half of the seven- 
teenth century. The first person who had the 
knack of writing conversationally — that is, writ- 
ing in a manner that reminds one of the speech 
of human beings — was the professional poet, 
Abraham Cowley. He wrote prose with his 
left hand ; but he was left-handed. Cowley was 
a born prosateur, as his poetry proves. His 
pretentious odes are like sign-posts pointing 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 31 

in the direction of poetry, which do not move 
themselves. His cumbersome, nickel-plated 
epic, Davideis, seems like Saul's huge armour, 
with David rattling around inside of it. But 
the prose parts of his essays, which he wrote 
just to please himself, have all the charm of 
the conversation of a cultivated gentleman. 
The great Dryden went to school to Cowley; 
and although he acknowledged again and again 
his debt to his teacher's verse, he really owed 
more to the prose. No writer who ever lived 
was more a man of his own age than John 
Dryden; and he seems to have perceived that 
Cowley had a command of a truly natural and 
essentially modern prose style. What is meant 
by this will be immediately apparent by com- 
paring a passage from Milton with a passage 
from Cowley. 

From the Areopagitica: 

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant 
nation rousing herself Hke a strong man after sleep, 
and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her 
as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling 
her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam ; purging 



32 THE ADVANCE OF 

and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain 
itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole noise of 
timorous and flocking birds, with those that love 
the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, 
and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a 
year of sects and schisms. 

From A Discourse Concerning the Govern- 
ment of Oliver Cromwell: 

It was the funeral day of the late man who made 
himself to be called protector. And though I bore 
but little affection, either to the memory of him, or 
to the trouble and folly of all public pageantry, yet 
I was forced by the importunity of my company to 
go along with them, and be a spectator of that solem- 
nity, the expectation of which had been so great that 
it was said to have brought some very curious per- 
sons (and no doubt singular virtuosos) as far as from 
the Mount in Cornwall, and from the Orcades. I 
found there had been much more cost bestowed than 
either the dead man, or indeed death itself, could 
deserve. . . . The vast multitude of spectators made 
up, as it uses to do, no small part of the spectacle it- 
self. But yet, I kaow not how, the whole was so 
managed that, methought, it somewhat represented 
the life of him for whom it was made; much noise, 
much tumult, much expense, much magnificence, much 
vainglory; briefly, a great show, and yet, after all 
this, but an ill sight. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 33 

Dryden, with his love of what was rational 
and unaffected, seems to have adopted Cowley's 
method of prose composition, and carried it to 
perfection. Dryden is called the Father of 
English prose : he left to his successors a prose 
style that combined simplicity, ease, and dis- 
tinction; a model followed immediately by De- 
foe, Swift, Addison and Steele. 

The English novel of manners had for its 
parents the Character Books and the Periodical 
Essay. With the decay of the Elizabethan 
Drama, the Character Books became popular. 
They were collections of sketches of familiar 
types of people ; the object of the writer being 
to give in as small as possible space a complete 
pen-picture of A Scholar, A Courtier, A Milk- 
maid, A Soldier, or whatever representative of 
humanity he happened to select. Although this 
species of literature was ostensibly objective, 
it was really self-conscious to the last degree. 
The author put his own personality into each 
sketch, filling in the outline with pungent com- 
ment. These character books helped to satisfy 
the natural curiosity of readers about human 



34 THE ADVANCE OF 

nature, especially after the opportunity to see 
human nature reveal itself on the stage was 
gone. A particular group of persons was 
isolated, and its main characteristics sharply 
emphasised; an undercurrent of satire salting 
the sketch. Thus it was natural that Samuel 
Butler, the famous author of Hudihras, should 
have been a prominent contributor to this 
school; although the most successful member 
of it was Bishop John Earle, who, in his Micro- 
cosmographie (1628) produced a portfolio of 
university portraits many of which would even 
to-day be recognised instantly as faithful like- 
nesses. The Character Books flourished in the 
seventeenth century, and furnished all the ma- 
terial for a realistic novel except the fable. 

This was supplied by the periodical essay, 
which reached fruition in the Spectator (1711), 
where the manners and customs of the day 
were accurately reflected. Here the Character 
Sketch ceased to be static, as in the Character 
Books, and became dynamic. It was just the 
difference between the photograph and the mov- 
ing picture. A person or group of persons was 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 35 

picked up, and carried along through certain 
familiar experiences. This method reached its 
climax in the popular Sir Eoger de Coverley 
papers, where, in portraying the varied activi- 
ties of this charming gentleman in town and 
country, the author was forced into actual nar- 
rative, which just misses being a connected 
story with a formal plot. 

Thus, with the sharp isolation of character, 
singled out, plainly labelled, a pin stuck through 
it to fix it in place, and then microscopically 
analysed — together with narrative sketches of 
contemporary scenes in town and country life, 
we have the two parents from whom our mod- 
ern realistic fiction came. 

Although Defoe certainly wrote the first Eng- 
lish novel, there was a story published in 1680, 
that differs from a genuine realistic novel only 
in intention. This was The Life and Death of 
Mr, B adman, by John Bunyan. It is a faith- 
ful picture of a contemporary man in a con- 
temporary environment; a history of the times 
and manners related in a downright, straight- 
forward style; and the restraint in the account 



36 THE ADVANCE OF 

of the death-scene shows exquisite art. The 
author wrote the book as a religious tract; 
otherwise it might rank as the earliest novel in 
the English language. 

The first English novel is still one of the most 
popular — Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, 
published in 1719. Defoe was fifty-eight years 
old when he wrote this story; and he had been 
scribbling steadily for over thirty years. He 
was a consummate realist, with a keen sense of 
fact; he had a telescopic imagination, and a 
microscopic eye. In subject-matter, Robinson 
Crusoe is wildly romantic; in method and in 
style, it is studiously realistic. For even in his 
romances, Defoe had the realistic manner, just 
as Victor Hugo in his realistic novels had the 
romantic style. Defoe describes life on a re- 
mote island as George Gissing would describe 
a London street; Victor Hugo writes of the 
sewers of Paris with superbly picturesque elo- 
quence. Defoe's genius for detail is what has 
made his masterpiece such a hot favourite with 
boys; the matter-of-fact boy never thinks to 
ask, Is it true! because he knows it is true, 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 37 

every page of it. Boys are immediately tied to 
the wheels of his narrative, and follow like 
slaves. 

The enormous popularity of Robinson Cru- 
soe has buried its author ^s name and overshad- 
owed all his other works of fiction; I suspect 
that not merely boys, but many men and women 
of some culture, would find it easier to give 
the name of Eobinson's servant than that of 
his creator; and how many general readers 
know Moll Flanders and Captain Singleton? 
I remember a good talk on books I enjoyed once 
with a distinguished Boston physician, who, 
though he had been brought up on Robinson 
Crusoe J did not know the name Defoe, and did 
not suspect that the author of Crusoe had writ- 
ten other novels. He was much interested, and 
carefully wrote down the titles for subsequent 
perusal. Yet it is true that if Defoe had never 
written his island story, he would still rank as 
the first English novelist, and as a realistic 
author of genius. For Moll Flanders (1722) 
and Roxana (1724) are shining examples of ab- 
solute realism ; they are, in the strictest use of 



38 THE ADVANCE OF 

the word, as truly realistic novels as is Jona- 
than Wild (1743) otMts, Martin's Man (1914). 
They give accurate pictures of the slums, with 
plans and specifications. 

Even in his story of sheer imagination, deal- 
ing with a region as remote from Defoe ^s ex- 
perience as Paradise, the author sticks faith- 
fully to the realistic method. In Captain 
Singleton (1720) Defoe took his readers across 
the Dark Continent. The book is filled with 
amazingly good guesses, many of which have 
been verified by explorers; and although, to 
those who really know the interior of Africa, 
the Captain's experiences might often arouse 
laughter, the whole thing sounds convincing 
enough to the tenderfoot. To me indeed it 
seems more truthful, and perhaps is, than the 
majority of ** books of travel'' I have read. 
For Defoe was a skilful and an artistic liar, 
who had considerable respect for his audience ; 
whereas many travellers and explorers seem to 
under-estimate the intelligence and overrate the 
receptivity of those who stay at home. I sus- 
pect that this book had a greater influence on 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 39 

Stevenson than any other of Defoe 's : we know 
from the former's statement that he studied 
the literary style of the first novelist with as- 
siduity. To test the result, I read through Cap- 
tain Singleton and immediately after read The 
Master of Ballantrae; and it was astonishing 
to see such extraordinary resemblance free 
from all taint of plagiarism. 

Every historian of literature will say that 
Defoe came closest to actual fact in his Journal 
of the Plague Year (1722), which has constantly 
been cited as showing the marvellous power of 
his imagination. Librarians and cataloguers 
who have classified it as ^* history '' have been 
treated by the critics with a tolerant smile, for 
is not such acceptation a tribute to the author's 
genius? It has remained for Dr. Watson 
Nicholson to discover and to prove that Defoe's 
work is not imagination, but rather the coher- 
ent assembling of facts and figures. Even in 
Defoe's wildest romances, he always seems to 
have his ^* sources": which, instead of being 
old ballads and poetic chronicles, were more 
like city directories, vital statistics, and cash 



40 THE ADVANCE OF 

accounts. I always used to wonder how it had 
been possible to describe that Plague Year with 
such convincing detail, when Defoe was simply 
sitting at his desk, spinning it all out of his 
imagination, and ^^ making it up as he went 
along.'' But Dr. Nicholson has studied the 
originals, and the comparison shows that De- 
foe stuck adhesively to his facts. Thus the 
famous Journal is history, after all, and not 
fiction; only it is history narrated by a great 
artist. 

For of all the works of Defoe, the Journal 
of the Plague Year shows the most complete 
mastery of prose style. The following passage 
is a proof that this author could occasionally 
bring off the rarest of all accomplishments in 
any form of art — he could make the finished 
result an absolute realisation of his intention. 

A certain citizen, who had Hved safe and untouched 
till the month of September, when the weight of the 
distemper lay more in the city than it had done be- 
fore, was mighty cheerful, and something too bold, as 
I think it was, in his talk of how secure he was, how 
cautious he had been, and how he had never come 
near any sick body. Says another citizen, a neigh- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 41 

bour of his, to liim one day, * ' Do not be too confident, 

Mr. , it is hard to say who is sick and who is 

well; for we see men alive and well, to outward ap- 
pearance, one hour, and dead the next.'' "That is 
true," says the first man, for he was not a man pre- 
sumptuously secure, but had escaped a long while; 
and men, as I said above, especially in the City, began 
to be over easy upon that score. ' ' That is true, ' ' says 
he, ' ' I do not think myself secure, but I hope I have 
not been in company with any person that there has 
been any danger in." ''No!" says his neighbour, 
*'was not you at the Bull-head tavern, in Gracechurch 

Street, with Mr. , the night before last ? " ' ' Yes, ' ' 

says the first, "I was, but there was nobody there 
that w^e had any reason to think dangerous." Upon 
which his neighbour said no more, being unwilling to 
surprise him ; but this made him more inquisitive, and 
as his neighbour appeared backward, he was the more 
impatient, and in a kind of warmth, says he aloud, 
' ' Why, he is not dead, is he ? " Upon which his neigh- 
bour still was silent, but cast up his eyes, and said 
something to himself ; at which the first citizen turned 
pale, and said no more but this, ''Then I am a dead 
man too," and went home immediately, and sent for 
a neighbouring apothecary to give him something 
preventive, for he had not yet found himself ill ; but 
the apothecary opening his breast, fetched a sigh, and 
said no more but this, "Look up to God"; and the 
man died in a few hours. 



42 THE ADVANCE OE 

Never was there a better illustration of the 
superiority of concrete instance over abstract 
statement and general description. The above 
paragraph gives a clearer impression of the 
ravages of the plague than long chapters of 
rhetorical emphasis could have done. If only 
preachers and philosophers would sit at the feet 
of Defoe ! Compare The Varieties of Religious 
Experience in interest (and in importance) with 
the majority of works on metaphysics. 

Our first English novelist set a notable ex- 
ample to his followers, in objectivity. Neither 
Flaubert nor his disciple Guy de Maupassant 
succeeded in holding themselves more aloof 
from their characters than did Defoe. It is 
amusing to remember that he called Robinson 
Crusoe an allegory and pretended that his slum 
stories had an ethical basis ; if we had only his 
novels, we should know no more about his char- 
acter and opinions than we know of William 
Shakespeare. 

A work that surely owed something to Robin- 
son Crusoe, though emanating from a far 
greater mind, was Gulliver's Travels (1726). 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 43 

This is probably the best-written work of fiction 
in the English language, for there has never 
lived a writer who had a more absolute com- 
mand of prose than Jonathan Swift. He wrote 
with such astonishing ease and perfection, that 
it seems as if even his most secret thoughts and 
meditations must have taken a correct literary 
form. It was a fine compliment to the new art 
of the novel that the greatest genius of the age 
should have selected that form for his satire 
against the animal called man. This work of 
candid pessimism and bitter cynicism stands 
next to Robinson Crusoe as a juvenile favour- 
ite ; because its marvellous imagination is made 
vivid by the same realism in details, and the 
drawings in the first two books are exactly ac- 
cording to scale. It is impossible to doubt 
either the veracity or the accuracy of the travel- 
ler. Both Bunyan and Swift would be included 
in the highest rank of English novelists, if their 
purpose in writing had not been so far afield. 
Defoe was fifty-eight when he wrote Robinson 
Crusoe, Swift was fifty-nine when he wrote 
Gulliver, and Eichardson was fifty-one when he 



44 THE ADVANCE OF 

wrote Pamela, Possibly one reason why the 
earliest forms of the English novel were so 
superbly developed — for the paradox is a truth 
■ — is because their makers were themselves so 
mature. The novel, which is a critical analysis 
of life, has usually been successful only when 
it has been the fruit of experience, and when 
the author has learned the technique of style 
in other forms of composition. Of our greatest 
English novelists, only one — Dickens — pub- 
lished a good novel before the age of thirty. 

Professor Ealeigh, in his admirable little 
book The English Novel — which combines the 
terse condensation of a manual with the easy 
and luminous style of good armchair talk — 
calls attention to the three modes of novel com- 
position. The author may tell his story as an 
invisible and omnipresent mind reader, he may 
put the whole thing into the speech of the lead- 
ing character, or he may depend exclusively on 
epistolary correspondence. One might add that 
many authors employ all three in one ; the story 
is told by the novelist, with the introduction of 
much conversation, varied by occasional letters. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 45 

The first method is not the best for youthful 
readers; for they must ask, as I used to ask 
on reading a sentence like ' ^ Geoffrey was think- 
ing deeply of a new plan of escape,*' — ^how does 
the author know what Geoffrey is thinking 
about? Telling the story in the first person, 
as in Lorna Doone and David Copperfield, re- 
stricts the range while heightening vividness; 
the great difficulty being that we know the nar- 
rator bears a charmed life. John Kidd is sure 
to emerge successfully from the most unpromis- 
ing situations ; and the reader has more curios- 
ity than suspense. Professor Moulton says that 
many people read novels with only a sporting 
interest, to see how the books end; this method 
should dull their attention. Dickens evidently 
felt the danger of this system, for the first sen- 
tence in David Copper field reads, *^ Whether I 
shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or 
whether that station will be held by anybody 
else, these pages must show." In Treasure 
Island Stevenson really solved the problem ; he 
obtained all the advantages of this method with 
none of its drawbacks; for the story is told in 



46 THE ADVANCE OF 

the first person, but by one of the least impor- 
tant characters* Thus we have constant vivid- 
ness, with no sense of security. The third way, 
having the whole novel consist of letters, is val- 
uable only for mature readers; but perhaps it 
is the best for revelation of character in its most 
elemental passions and most trivial caprices. 
Perhaps it is also best for creating and main- 
taining the illusion. In a way, too, this plan 
combines the excellences of the second and third 
methods. When a story is told in the first 
person, it is like reading a long letter from one 
character, as the first paragraph of any such 
novel will prove ; in a series of letters by differ- 
ent hands, one gains all the vitality of direct dis- 
course, with the advantages of a varied com- 
pany, any one of whom may meet a tragic end. 
It is rather interesting to remember that our 
first three professional novelists adopted in 
their respective masterpieces the three different 
styles of fiction. Defoe had Eobinson Crusoe 
tell his own story; Eichardson developed the 
character of Clarissa in a series of letters ; and 
Fielding wrote the ^^ history'' of Tom Jones. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 47 

We have here an interesting comparison of three 
great artists at work. I suppose that if most 
critics were asked to state a preference, they 
would say, ^'The greatest of these is Fielding/' 
If they were asked to name the least didactic, 
once more they would say Fielding. Yet I be- 
lieve that the art of Defoe and Eichardson has 
more aloofness, more objectivity, more severity 
and more sincerity than the art of Fielding ; and 
that however anxious Defoe and Eichardson 
may have been to strengthen the forces of con- 
ventional morality, however * ^preachy" they 
may have been by nature, their two masterpieces 
are distinctly less didactic than Tom Jones, 
For the method according to which Robinson 
and Clarissa were written forbade the intrusion 
of the author; whereas Fielding, by adopting 
the scheme most popular among his successors, 
gave himself full liberty to interpose in the 
story, to comment on its progress, on the char- 
acters, on life in general; in doing this, he es- 
tablished a bad precedent in English fiction ; for 
English novelists have been notable for didactic 
and sentimental interruptions in their narra- 



i8 THE ADVANCE OF 

tives, and for a condescending attitude toward 
their readers; both of which habits aid in de- 
stroying the illusion and lead to downright in- 
sincerity. 

Enormous is the difference between Eichard- 
son's prefaces and Eichardson's novels. His 
prefaces are like the rhetorical and tedious pre- 
liminary remarks delivered by the lecturer while 
the lights are on ; and we begin the first chapter 
with the same relief and expectancy that the 
audience greet the extinction of the lamps and 
the language, and see the snow-capped mountain 
leap into view. For however the orator may 
rave and moralise about the mountain, the 
mountain itself is objective. The moment Eich- 
ardson leaves his damnable faces and begins, 
he is an absolute artist. No novel that I can 
think of has a more direct opening than Pamela; 
the attention of the reader is instantly captured ; 
and in the first paragraph both the heroine and 
villain are presented. At the end of the pref- 
ace, Eichardson withdraws from the story — 
even as the alloy left Browning's famous ring 
with one spirt of the acid. If we did not know 



i. 



\ 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 49 

the greatness of Richardson the novelist, Rich- 
ardson the preacher would block the way. Let 
us compare the opening sentences of the pref- 
ace to Pamela with the first words of the novel. 

If to Divert and Entertain, and at the same time 
to Instruct and Improve the Minds of the Youth of 
both Sexes: 

If to inculcate Religion and Morality in so easy and 
agreeable a maimer, as shall render them equally de- 
lightful and profitable : 

If to set forth in the most exemplary Lights, the 
Parental, the Fihal, and the Social Duties: 

(All this is followed by seven other ifs.) 
We turn to the first page of the story. 

Dear Father and Mother, — I have great trouble, 
and some comfort, to acquaint you with. The trouble 
is, that my good lady died of the illness I mentioned 
to you, and left us all much grieved for the loss of 
her; for she was a dear good lady, and kind to all 
us her servants. Much I feared, that as I was taken 
by her ladyship to wait upon her person, I should be 
quite destitute again, and forced to return to you and 
my poor mother, who have enough to do to maintain 
yourselves; and, as my lady's goodness had put me 
to write and cast accounts, and made me a little ex- 
pert at my needle, and otherwise qualified above my 
degree, it was not every family that could have found 



50 THE ADVANCE OF 

a place that your poor Pamela was fit for : but God, 
whose graeiousness to us we have so often experienced 
at a pinch, put it into my good lady's heart on her 
death-bed, just an hour before she expired, to recom- 
mend to my young master all her servants, one by 
one ; and when it came to my turn to be recommended 
(for I was sobbing and crying at her pillow), she 
could only say. My dear son ! — and so broke off a little ; 
and then recovering — Eemember my poor Pamela — 
And these were some of her last words! Oh, how 
my eyes run — don 't wonder to see the paper so blotted. 

After another paragraph, she signs the letter, 
and then adds a postscript : 

I have been scared out of my senses ; for just now, 
as I was folding up this letter in my late lady 's dress- 
ing-room, in comes my young master! Good sirs! 
how was I frightened! I went to hide the letter in 
my bosom; and he, seeing me tremble, said, smiling, 
''To whom have you been writing, Pamela?" etc. 

Eichardson felt the necessity of writing apol- 
ogies for his great works of fiction. But his 
apologies are written in a cramped and intoler- 
ably formal style, full of canting generalities. 
The instant he begins his story, it is as though 
he threw off a mask, resumed his natural voice, 
and narrated without any didactic ardour. For 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 51 

the letters in the story seldom begin with gen- 
eralities, but are intensely concrete and intensely 
dramatic. The difference between the tone of 
the prefaces and the tone of the story is like the 
change in many a parson's voice when he has 
iinished the grace before meat, and begins to 
talk about the weather. 

The immense length of Richardson's novels 
is part of his scheme, and yet he does remind 
us of the after-dinner speaker who was pleas- 
antly introduced by the toastmaster as an ora- 
tor of excellent initiative, but totally lacking in 
terminal facilities. I sometimes think that his 
novels were not meant to be read by individuals 
but by dynasties and generations; the grand- 
father puts in a bookmark and dies, and his ma- 
ture son takes up the burden at that point. 
Yet the proof that Richardson was correct in his 
proportions is seen in the fact that every at- 
tempt to abridge his novels has been a failure. 
Much better never to read Clarissa than to read 
it clipped. Its length is an essential feature of 
the plot. Richardson had the genius for expan- 
sion shown by Robert Browning in the Ring and 



52 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

the Booh; there is more than one close analogy 
between Clarissa and that epic. The whole 
story can be told in a dozen lines ; but in each 
case the author has expanded it into volumes. 
There is not now any interest of suspense; the 
poet gave the whole plot away at the start, and 
every modern reader knows what happened to 
Clarissa. The object of the artist in each case 
was complete psychological analysis; which 
could not have been achieved except by accumu- 
lation of detail. Eichardson is the originator 
of the psychological novel; and in two respects 
he has never been surpassed — in the tireless pa- 
tience of his analysis, and in his unflinching 
march toward the inevitable tragic close. 



CHAPTEE III 

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, STERNE 

Popularity and immortality — the reason why Richard- 
son's Continental fame exceeded Fielding's — effect of the 
personal essay — the insincerity of Fielding — its bad in- 
fluence on the English novel — Fielding's didacticism — his 
humour — comic men and tragic women — sensational titles to 
novels — Smollett the naturalist — Dr. Johnson and Rasselas 
— Goldsmith — the personality of Sterne — ^the sentimental 
novel in the eighteenth century — the sentimental novel in 
the twentieth century. 

It is a common and pathetic delusion of unpop- 
ular writers to believe that at their death their 
works will not follow them, but will remain to 
charm ** millions yet unborn.'' Unfortunately 
for this faith, which has been the solace and the 
stimulus of many fictionists, the fact is that 
there has never been a great English novelist 
who was not popular in his own lifetime. The 
world often runs after false gods, but it seldom 
neglects true deities. What revealing element 
is there in true works of genius that makes their 

63 



54 THE ADVANCE OF 

transcendent merit so instantly manifest to 
thousands of uncultivated people! Sometimes 
it seems as if the greatness of a literary work 
were as unmistakable — as immediately clear — 
as the size of a tall man. An astronomer knows 
more about stars than the man in the street; 
but the superior brilliance of a star of the first 
magnitude is as evident to the untrained eyes 
as to the expert. When the object judged is 
really important, future generations do little 
more than ratify contemporary opinion. No 
one has ever improved on Ben Jonson's criti- 
cism of Shakespeare, of Dry den's appraisal of 
Milton. Defoe, Swift, and Eichardson were as 
much admired by their contemporaries, and for 
precisely the same reasons, as they are praised 
to-day. 

The London success of Pamela and Clarissa 
is therefore not in the least surprising; but it 
is rather remarkable that they should have 
aroused such ecstatic wonder among the French, 
that they should have thrilled three men so dif- 
ferent as Diderot, the Abbe Prevost and Rous- 
seau, and should have proved to be an actual 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 55 

contributory force to the French Eevolution. 
One reason why Eichardson was so much more 
popular on the Continent than Fielding, was be- 
cause Eichardson lost nothing in translation; 
Fielding lost irreparably. You can translate a 
story; you cannot translate a style. For the 
same reason, Cooper has been a hundred times 
more widely read in Europe than Hawthorne; 
the wonderful grace, distinction, and shy aus- 
terity of Hawthorne's language vanish in a 
translation; whereas every time you translate 
Cooper, you improve him. He was a marvel- 
lous romancer, with a good story, fascinating 
characters, and bad style; so that I have al- 
ways believed that the French, the Germans, the 
Poles, the Eussians really have a finer collec- 
tion of Leather- Stocking Tales than the Ameri- 
cans. 

Fielding, like his disciple Thackeray, was a 
natural-born humourist, with a sure instinct for 
burlesque. To him Eichardson was as intoler- 
able as were the Puritans to the Cavaliers. For 
over ten years Fielding had been having a merry 
time with stage burlesque when Pamela ap- 



56 THE ADVANCE OF 

peared; its prodigious success aroused every 
fibre of opposition in his soul, for to him it rep- 
resented smug, canting hypocrisy — the religion 
of the scribes and Pharisees. We may rejoice 
that it stung him into creative composition ; al- 
though he was of course constitutionally inca- 
pable of appreciating either Eichardson's artis- 
tic merits or his immense significance. 

Although the Character Book and the 
Periodical Essay were the parents of the Eng- 
lish novel, a third species of literature seems 
to have had a powerful influence on Fielding, 
and still more on Fielding's successor, Sterne. 
This "was the Personal Essay, a peculiarly in- 
dividual kind of writing, totally different from 
critical essays like Matthew Arnold's and from 
reflective essays on abstract themes, like Bacon's 
or Emerson's. It is an intimate, confessional 
style of composition, where the writer takes the 
reader completely into his confidence, and talks 
as if to only one listener ; talks, too, about things 
often essentially trivial, and yet making them 
for the moment interesting by the charm of the 
speaker's manner. The first great master of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 57 

this school remains supreme and unapproach- 
able — Montaigne, a universal favourite with 
lovers of books. Burton's Anatomy of Melan- 
choly is a kind of monstrous personal essay; 
the species was immortally illustrated in the 
seventeenth century by Cowley, by Browne in 
the whimsical and fantastic Garden of Cyrus, 
by Tom Fuller in Good Thoughts in Bad Times; 
and some of the papers in the Tatler, Spectator, 
and Guardian could be classed in this group. 
No literature we have is more self-conscious 
than this; and of all eighteenth-century novel- 
ists, none was more self-conscious than Henry 
Fielding. 

In his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), he 
was not content with writing a general and (to 
me) rather tedious introduction to the whole 
work; three of the four books into which the 
story is divided are respectively introduced with 
a short personal essay. This custom was con- 
tinued in Tom Jones; and however charming, 
witty, and satirical they may be, they break the 
continuity of the narrative, destroy the illusion, 
and disconcert the reader ; it is as if, before each 



58 THE ADVANCE OF 

act of a great comedy, the author should appear 
before the footlights, and condescendingly ad- 
dress the audience. 

It may seem odd to accuse Fielding of any- 
thing like insincerity; and yet these side talks 
with his readers, these constant intrusions of 
the master of the show, are not only funda- 
mentally insincere from the point of view of 
art, they established a bad tradition in English 
fiction. Far too many of our British novelists 
have regarded themselves as caterers, whose 
business is to tickle the palate of the reading 
public; and they have followed in the wake of 
Fielding. In the first chapter of the second 
book of Joseph Andrews, we read, **It becomes 
an author generally to divide a book, as it does 
a butcher to joint his meat, for such assistance 
is of great help to both the reader and the 
carver. And now, having indulged myself a 
little, I will endeavour to indulge the curiosity 
of my reader, who is no doubt impatient to 
know what he will find in the subsequent chap- 
ters of this book. ' ' 

This attitude toward the reader was faith- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 59 

fully followed by many Anglo-Saxon novelists; 
many instances could be given ; but one of the 
best echoes of Fielding's personal remarks may 
be found in the second chapter of Anthony 
Trollope's Doctor Thome: "A few words must 
still be said about Miss Mary before we rush 
into our story; the crust will then have been 
broken, and the pie will be open to the guests." 
The difference between sincerity in Eussian fic- 
tion and in English fiction may be expressed 
by saying that in Tom Jones we admire the 
carefully planned and well executed realism; 
in Anna Karenina we are in a world of absolute 
reality. 

It is often said by critics who should know 
better that Eichardson was not only offensively 
didactic, but that his view of morality was low; 
because he emphasises the rewards of a moral 
life, either in substantial worldly advantages 
or in sorrowless immortality; whereas Fielding 
was never consciously didactic, and represented 
the dividends of virtue simply in increased 
greatness of character. To settle the truth of 
these statements, let us read what Eichardson 



60 THE ADVANCE OF 

wrote to Lady Bradshaigh, who was not satis- 
fied to have Clarissa get her reward in heaven, 
but preferred a little earthly felicity. The 
author wrote, ** Clarissa has the greatest of 
triumphs even in this world. The greatest, I 
will venture to say, even in and after the out- 
rage, and because of the outrage, that ever 
woman had. ' ' 

And in reply to the statement that Fielding 
is not consciously didactic, but is willing to let 
the moral of his books speak for itself, we have 
simply to read the first paragraph of the dedi- 
cation of Amelia: *'The following book is sin- 
cerely designed to promote the cause of virtue, 
and to expose some of the most glaring evils, 
as well public as private, which at present in- 
fest the country." 

Fielding speaks more persuasively as a 
great humourist; one of the greatest in Eng- 
lish literature. His view of the world had the 
immense tolerance and profound sympathy of 
the true humourist, along with keenness of ob- 
servation whetted by satire. The ground qual- 
ity of his mind was humour. In Joseph An- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 61 

drews it took the form of burlesque; intended 
originally as a parody on Eichardson and Col- 
ley Gibber, it widened into a broad creative 
work, retaining the burlesque element in the 
scenes of rough farce. In Jonathan Wild it 
took the form of irony, irony on a vast, univer- 
sal scale. In Tom Jones, his masterpiece, it 
supplied exactly the right medium in which all 
the characters lived, and moved, and had their 
being, besides enabling him to give that wonder- 
ful type-portrait of Squire Western. In 
Amelia, it furnished that deep tenderness in- 
evitably characteristic of great humourists. 

The never-drying springs of humour in Field- 
ing 's nature gave a richness, fruitiness, variety, 
and complexity to his novels that one misses in 
Eichardson ; and yet, had the author of Clarissa 
possessed a sense of humour, he could not pos- 
sibly have written a work of such detailed, pro- 
found, and prolonged analysis. His mind 
would have reacted on itself, and he would have 
looked upon his own creations ironically, as 
Fielding did. Furthermore, Fielding was es- 
sentially a comic writer, and Eichardson at his 



62 THE ADVANCE OF 

best in tragedy. Once more, Eicliardson was 
more successful in depicting women than men; 
Fielding just tlie contrary. Mr. B — and Sir 
Charles do not compare for a moment with 
Parson Adams, Tom Jones, and Squire Wes- 
tern ; but neither will Sophia or Amelia live for 
a moment when placed beside Pamela and Clar- 
issa. Now it is impossible to draw the charac- 
ter of a man convincingly without a sense of 
humour ; whereas in the portrayal of a perfectly 
natural woman this quality is not necessary. 
Say what you will about the equality of the 
sexes, man is essentially a comic character; and 
woman, tragic. 

Fielding's men are wonderful — ^being, like all 
real men, imperfectly tamed beasts. Thomas 
Gray, an inveterate reader of French novels, 
was advised by his friend, Eichard West, to 
read the new story Joseph Andrews, and his 
criticism after doing so remains true unto this 
day. *^The incidents are ill laid and without 
invention; but the characters have a great deal 
of nature, which always pleases even in her 
lowest shapes. Parson Adams is perfectly 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 63 

well ; so is Mrs. Slipslop, and the story of Wil- 
son ; and throughout he shows himself well read 
in Stage-Coaches, Country Squires, Inns, and 
Inns of Court. His reflections upon high peo- 
ple and low people, and misses and masters, 
are very good. However the exaltedness of 
some minds (or rather as I shrewdly suspect 
their insipidity and want of feeling or observa- 
tion) may make them insensible to these light 
things (I mean such as characterise and paint 
nature), yet surely they are as weighty and 
much more useful than your grave discourses 
upon the mind, the passions, and what not." 

Thomas Gray combined profound scholarship 
with a hatred of pedantry ; the fact that his fas- 
tidious mind recognised immediately the artis- 
tic dignity of a truthful portrayal of low life, is 
one more example of the hospitality of his soul. 
And this first criticism of Joseph Andreivs con- 
victs of shallowness persons who read works on 
philosophy and metaphysics, and scorn novels ; 
for a great novel is simply a profound study in 
the concrete of what philosophy attempts in the 
abstract. The ** exaltedness'' of some minds, 



64 THE ADVANCE OF 

is, as Gray says, often a mask wMch conceals a 
**want of feeling or observation." 

The real defect in Joseph Andrews was 
pointed out immediately by Gray, just as he saw 
its greatest virtue. The incidents would have 
been better managed had not the author started 
with the avowed intention of composing a bur- 
lesque; this blemish in Fielding's first novel is 
conspicuously absent in Tom Jones, which, ac- 
cording to Coleridge, has one of the three great- 
est plots in all literature. In Joseph Andrews, 
the basis of the novel is not a story; in Tom 
Jones, it is. Fielding became a master work- 
man ; and handled the intricacies of this orderly 
narrative with impressive ease. 

Ambitious authors who hunt for sensational 
titles to attract the public would do well to re- 
member that the majority of immortal novels 
have common-place names. In Fielding's mas- 
terpiece the name is intentionally common- 
place, for it might equally as well have been 
called the History of a Man. Thackeray's re- 
mark about it is not really true, and if it were, 
it would not reflect much credit on Thackeray. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 65 

Tom Jones is meant to be a memorandum rather 
than a model. He is not what we ought to be- 
come, but what too many of us are ; and the real 
reason why men and women are so fond of him 
is because he is a perfectly healthy male; as 
Mrs. Atherton would say, he is one hundred 
per cent, masculine. 

With environment altered, Tom Jones would 
be a faithful portrait in the twentieth century; 
Sophia Western would not do at all. 

Coarseness and fineness are the characteris- 
tics respectively of the work of Smollett and 
Sterne. One used an axe, the other a needle. 
Eichardson was an analyst, Fielding a realist, 
Smollett a naturalist. Smollett was not by na- 
ture a creative artist, as Fielding undoubtedly 
was; he was a man of fact rather than fancy; 
and his experiences gave him more material 
than inspiration. He was a physician and a 
sailor; he broke into the ranks of the novelists 
by brute force, and has retained his position by 
the same quality. He wrote stories, where the 
travelling hero wanders rather aimlessly 
through a series of adventures. An excellent 



66 THE ADVANCE OF 

illustration of this kind of novel is seen in 1915 
in Sinclair Lewis 's TJie Trail of the Haivk. 

His first two novels are exactly contemporary 
with the masterpieces of Eichardson and Field- 
ing; for Roderick Random appeared in 1748, 
and Peregrine Pickle in 1751. The immense 
vitality of these two novels won a sure place 
both in contemporary favour and in the history 
of literature ; outweighing glaring faults in con- 
struction, and many crudities and excrescences. 
The indecencies of his books were patent to 
every one except the author, who said, in the 
third edition of Peregrine Pickle, *^He flatters 
himself that he has expunged every adventure, 
phrase, and insinuation, that could be construed 
by the most delicate reader into a trespass upon 
the rules of decorum/' Writers are the worst 
judges in the world of the morality of their 
works; he writeth, and wipeth his pen, and 
saith, **I have done no wickedness." 

Eichardson declared, in the preface to 
Pamela, that he had composed the work ** with- 
out raising a single idea throughout the whole, 
that shall shock the exactest purity, even in the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 67 

warmest of those instances where purity would 
be most apprehensive.'' When Vanbrugh was 
attacked by Jeremy Collier he said he had never 
written anything that the most virtuous damsel 
might not keep in her chamber with her Bible. 
Perhaps no man is ever quite so absurd as 
when he is defending himself from a just accu- 
sation. 

Smollett is a man's novelist; I have never 
heard a woman praise him. There is no doubt 
that men enjoy buffoonery, horse-play, and 
rough farce ; women not only do not enjoy these 
things, they cannot understand how or why re- 
fined and educated men should enjoy them. 
Mrs. Oliphant could not comprehend the general 
praise of Burns 's Jolly Beggars; and after 
fruitless speculation, she finally reached the 
wise conclusion that the difference in her appre- 
ciation was simply a difference of sex. *^ There 
must always be, we presume, however age and 
experience may modify nature, a certain in- 
ability on the part of a woman to appreciate 
the more riotous forms of mirth, and that ro- 
bust freedom in morals which bolder minds ad- 



eS THE ADVANCE OF 

mire. It is a disability which nothing can 
abolish. ' ' 

Men often laugh at women for their interest 
in what seems to men trivialities, details of 
clothing, ** social columns'' and ^^ woman's 
page" in the newspapers; but women find it in- 
comprehensible that a great scholar like Burton 
should delight in the coarse repartee of the 
bargemen, and that cultivated gentlemen should 
read with close attention two columns of fine 
print, consisting of statements like this: *^At 
the beginning of the fifth round. Jack ducked, 
and delivered a jolt in the slats." 

I once met a United States Army lieutenant, 
a gentleman of wide reading and good taste, 
who told me without the slightest doubt the 
greatest novel in the English language was 
Humphry Clinker, Smollett wrote it while he 
was dying, and it is notable that this robust and 
healthy masterpiece should come from a mor- 
tally sick man, though a hundred years later 
another and greater Scot brought the same 
event to pass. Smollett followed the scheme of 
Eichardson in this novel, putting it into the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 69 

form of letters, its only resemblance to his 
predecessor. This book is full of rich coarse 
humour, and has at the same time the preserving 
quality of original genius. 

To read Smollett's novels is like witnessing, 
from a safe coign of vantage, a free fight, hear- 
ing resounding whacks and resounding oaths. 
For Smollett's heroes do not talk as if they had 
been no further than Finsbury; much of his 
humour consists in his language. Why is it 
that every one in the audience laughs when the 
man on the stage says ^^damn''? 

Critics whose zeal for parallels exceeds their 
knowledge of the subject, have often repeated 
the saying that Thackeray is the child of Field- 
ing, and Dickens of Smollett. The considera- 
ble amount of truth in the first half of the state- 
ment should not lead to any acceptance of the 
second. No two novelists in English literature 
are more unlike than Smollett and Dickens. 
Of all our writers of fiction, Smollett is the most 
heartless ; he had a gusto for life, and men and 
women amused him prodigiously; but his books 
show no tenderness and no real sympathy, for 



70 THE ADVANCE OF 

if he had possessed these qualities, his work 
would have been more complex. Balzac wrote 
the human comedy: Smollett wrote the human 
farce. Now the one absolutely dominating 
characteristic of Dickens is tenderness ; he had 
the mind of a man, and the heart of a child. 

Again, of all British novelists — with the pos- 
sible exception of Sterne — Smollett is the least 
spiritual; there is no other-worldliness in Bod- 
erick Random or Peregrine Pickle. There is 
not only no Christian element in these stories, 
there is no religious atmosphere of any kind. 
Dickens, on the other hand, is one of the most 
powerful allies of Christianity that English 
literature has ever produced. The whole foun- 
dation of his works is the love of God and the 
love of man. 

Dr. Johnson is numbered among the novelists 
as Saul was among the prophets. He was not 
exactly fitted to write so concrete a form of lit- 
erature, and the wonder is, as he said of the 
woman and the dog, that he could do it at all. 
It is commonly stated (incorrectly) that he 
wrote Rasselas (1759) to defray the expenses 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 71 

of his mother's funeral; to-day, could such a 
work get into print, it might conceivably hasten 
the funeral of its author. Eemembering the 
spirited beginning of Pamela, it is instructive to 
read the opening sentence of Rasselas: — 

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of 
fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of 
hope; who expect that age will perform the promises 
of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day 
will be supplied by the morrow ; — attend to the history 
of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia. 

It is much easier to listen with credulity to the 
whispers of fancy, than it is to listen at all to 
the history of Rasselas. This novel remains in 
English literature an embalmed corpse, pre- 
served by Johnson's great and noble name. 

The Doctor's volatile friend, Oliver Gold- 
smith, had much better success; fiction being 
really his natural element. The Vicar of Wahe- 
field (1766) has an immortal charm, a fadeless 
beauty. Goldsmith had all the qualifications 
that his learned contemporary lacked; a truly 
creative imagination, great facility in composi- 
tion, the irresistible humorous tenderness so 



72 THE ADVANCE OF 

characteristic of the sons and daughters of Ire- 
land. In literature Johnson was a super-dread- 
nought, Goldsmith an excursion steamer. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of happy men, women, and 
children have loved to travel anywhere with 
Goldy. So far as I know, there has been only 
one discontented passenger — Mark Twain, who 
said that any list of books for reading was a 
good list, so long as it did not contain The Vicar 
of Wakefield. 

Smollett was a physician and Sterne a minis- 
ter of the gospel; one trained in science, the 
other in sentiment. Both men died in middle 
life, but literature lost little by their early dis- 
appearance. Smollett had apparently given 
the world the very best that was in him; and 
Sterne would not have completed either Tris- 
tram Shandy or the Sentimental Journey, for 
the quintessence of those works is their incom- 
pleteness ; and we have enough of both. Sterne 
was really an invalid, and the finest thing in his 
whole life, character, and career, is the marvel- 
lous courage he showed in facing his own dis- 
ease. He regarded his frequent and violent 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 73 

hemorrhages with ironical humour. It is im- 
possible to understand Sterne; he defies both 
analysis and appraisal. Professor Cross, in his 
admirable biography, has told us more about 
this man than was ever known before, giving 
us at the same time an accurate picture of the 
times. But Sterne is elusive. 

Sterne's nature was passive rather than ac- 
tive. He might have said with Keats, * ' Oh, for 
a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!'' 
He was a veritable ^olian harp, for the winds 
of passion, fancy, sentiment, mirth, and pathos 
to play on. In sheer invention he was weak, or 
lazy : there must be an exciting cause from with- 
out, either in some street spectacle, or in some 
book that he was reading. This external stimu- 
lus would set him off into the strangest vagaries 
and paradoxes. He was both irreverent and 
immoral ; the coarse explicitness of Fielding and 
Smollett changed into evil suggestion, refined 
wickedness. Morally, we rate him below almost 
all other great English novelists, for, as Eos- 
tand says, *^The sound of a kiss is less danger- 
ous than the silence of a smile." 



74 THE ADVANCE OF 

In sentiment Sterne was an epicure. His 
extraordinary sensitiveness to impressions 
made him instantly responsive, intensely aware, 
and as changeable as the wind. With women 
he was a philanderer, too self-conscious to be 
deeply passionate, too responsive to be con- 
stant. His books are the echoes of his reading 
without being dishonourably plagiaristic ; Eab- 
elais, Cervantes, Burton's Anatomy of Melan- 
choly, and his immediate predecessors in Eng- 
land are all threaded into that crazy-quilt in 
literature, Tristam Shandy. 

For my part, I find Sterne's humour much 
better than his pathos. Whatever he may have 
borrowed from other books, his humour was his 
own, subtle, pervading, and constantly giving 
the reader a sharp surprise. The quizzical 
mask of this fantastic parson conceals his in- 
tention until we are suddenly and palpably hit ; 
and much of his humour remains unfathomable. 
For what Sterne's thoughts were when he 
looked in the mirror no one can guess. The 
epitaph of John Gay perhaps comes nearest to 
a soliloquy by our Yorick. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 75 

Life is a jest, and all things show it: 
I thought so once, but now I know it. 

The difference between the light cynicism of the 
epitaph written by Gay and the terrible indict- 
ment of the epitaph written by Swift is just the 
difference between the man who regards life as 
a joke, and the man who regards himself as the 
joke of life. 

Sterne's pathos — with the possible exception 
of the famous starling — has always left me cold. 
The ass in the Sentim.ental Journey and the ass 
in Tristram arouse my respect for the writer's 
ingenuity; but if one will compare these in- 
stances with the brief sketch of the ass in Guy 
de Maupassant's Mont Oriol, he will see the dif- 
ference between a professional sentimentalist 
in fine virtuoso work, and the profound sym- 
pathy of a great tragic artist. I do not see how 
any one can read that page in the F^rench novel 
without tears. 

The stream of Sentimentalism — enormously 
widened, deepened, and accelerated by Sterne, — 
rose in the first half of the eighteenth century, 
when Samuel Eichards':^^ created the Sentimen- 



76 THE ADVANCE OF 

tal Novel. Shortly after tlie appearance of 
the final volume of Clarissa, the word *^senti- 
mentaP' was high in favour; so much so, that 
on 9 January, 1750, Lady Bradshaigh wrote 
directly to Eichardson for a decision. **What, 
in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sen- 
timental, so much in vogue amongst the polite, 
both in town and country?" Everj^ one wore 
their hearts on their sleeves in those days, for 
daws to pick at; and Sterne, the real jackdaw 
of fiction, had no difficulty in putting his beak 
into the public heart. Eichardson had got all 
Europe into tears, and those were golden days 
for the sentimentalists. A learned German 
professor said that he had wept away some of 
the most remarkable hours of his life, ^'in a sort 
of delicious misery" — a phrase that exactly 
expresses the strange happiness felt by thou- 
sands of readers at that time. Eousseau — the 
greatest sentimentalist in all history, and the 
most influential writer of the modern age — ^be- 
gan La Nouvelle Heloise under the inspiration 
of Clarissa; this in turn led to WertJier and the 
whole Sturm und Drang period in Germany. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 77 

No wonder the beginnings of the English novel 
are Avorth serious study, when we find their 
profound effect in such movements as the Wes- 
leyan Eevival in England, and the mighty revo- 
lution in France. 

Sterne's Sentimental Journey was begotten 
by Eichardson, though the grave printer would 
have disoAvned it; and a flood of sentimental 
fiction was let loose in England. Those who are 
able to wade in such lachrymose literature may 
read Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771). Its 
author was a young man, and he followed the 
fashion. English common-sense and English 
humour were both too strong to permit a long 
reign — or shall we say rain! — of such an ele- 
ment. 

Although the Sentimental Novel could not 
long maintain its supremacy, there has never 
been a period of English literature when senti- 
mental novels did not flourish. The most strik- 
ing illustration of the success of the sentimental 
novel in England in the twentieth century is the 
prodigious vogue of The Rosary, a book written 
by the wife of an English clergyman. Unless I 



78 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

am mistaken, over a million copies of this novel 
have been sold in England and in America. It 
is an admirable illustration of the school. In 
America the immense circulation of the books 
of Gene Stratton Porter bears positive testi- 
mony to the love of Anglo-Saxons for the Sen- 
timental Novel. We can at any rate say of this 
English and of this American author that their 
works please many thousands of respectable 
men and women. 



CHAPTER IV 

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ROMANCES 

The silence of forty years — the English romantic move- 
ment — Longsword — Horace Walpole, the faddist — Mrs. 
Radcliffe and Monk Lewis — Northanger Abbey, the bur- 
lesque — difference between women in 1915 and women in 
1815 — Jane Austen and Booth Tarking-ton — climax of the 
romantic movement in Walter Scott. 

The forty years that elapsed from tlie publica- 
tion of Humphry Clinker (1771) to Sense and 
Sensibility (1811) are notable for the absence 
of good fiction. Not a single first-class novel 
appeared. English manners were mirrored 
and satirised by Frances Burney, and at the 
very end of the century Maria Edgeworth 
coined her Irish experiences ; but both these ir- 
reproachable novelists are faint in comparison 
with the great geniuses of English fiction and 
are growing fainter in the process of years. 

One reason why no good novels were pro- 
duced during this period was because the mighty 
name of Eichardson had drawn a host of imita- 

79 



80 THE ADVANCE OF 

tors in his wake ; and while Eichardson himself 
was and is splendid, imitations of him are 
nearly the last word in human tedium. An- 
other and better reason is seen in the rise of the 
Eomantic Movement, which gave to many ab- 
surd prose romances immense temporary fame, 
but which produced nothing of importance be- 
fore Walter Scott. 

For the first fifty years of the eighteenth cen- 
tury the classicists and the realists ruled; the 
words ^'gothic'' and ^* romantic" were in bad 
odour ; it was thought plebeian to be demonstra- 
tive ; joyful enthusiasm and sobs of grief were 
alike unfashionable. Toward the close of the 
century any novelist of even ordinary ability 
could strike the once stony British heart, and 
streams of water flowed; everything mediaeval 
and ^^gothic" became a fad; and wild tales of 
mystery and horror were mightily cried up. 

English literature is instinctively romantic; 
and it took men of genius, like Pope and Swift, 
Eichardson and Fielding, to repress and shackle 
the national spirit; just as in France it took a 
superman like Victor Hugo to fight with any 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 81 

success against the well-regulated and sober 
soul of Gallic prose. Toward the close of the 
eighteenth century, a natural reaction — which 
had begun in a variety of instinctive and uncon- 
scious ways — asserted itself against the tyranny 
of classicism; and as the reaction gathered 
force, it was guilty of absurd excesses. The 
eighteenth century revolt, which turned Eng- 
lish fiction into a kind of nightmare during the 
last ten years, had its parallel exactly a hun- 
dred years later, in an exceedingly lively re- 
vival of romance which reached a climax in 
1900. 

One supremely valuable thing — that England 
had sought in vain for centuries — came near to 
being lost in all this hurly-burly ; I mean a per- 
fect English prose style. The mastery of prose, 
richly illustrated in fictitious narrative by De- 
foe, Swift, Addison, and Fielding, ceased to be 
characteristic of the novel — ceased to exist in 
the novel. Fortunately pure and natural prose 
was kept alive by Boswell in biography and by 
Gibbon in history. 

Although the impatient, free spirit of Smol- 



82 THE ADVANCE OF 

lett had found the limits of space and time 
somewhat irksome, and had in Ferdinand, 
Count Fathom sought a world at once impossi- 
ble and fascinating, he can never rank as a fore- 
runner of the romantic movement in prose fic- 
tion; for he was a realist. The first genuine 
historical romance of the eighteenth century — 
the first earnest of Scott's fiction — ^was Long- 
sword, by the Eev. Thomas Leland, published 
in 1762. This book to-day is unread and forgot- 
ten ; but it ought to be remembered by literary 
historians, for its significance is as great as its 
intrinsic worth is small. In plot, story, frame- 
work, setting, characterisation, this little book 
is a forerunner of the great romances of Scott. 
It is indeed the first modern romance of chivalry 
in the English language. In the ** Advertise- 
ment," the author stated that *^the outlines of 
the following story, and some of the incidents 
and more minute circumstances, are to be found 
in the ancient English historians.'' It is, like 
Ivanhoe, a story of jousts and knightly adven- 
tures ; of ladies dead and lovely knights. Ex- 
alted constancy between man and maid is the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 83 

basis of the plot. The style is pneumatic, but 
it was the style that was to be the fashion for 
fifty years: dare I quote? 

A youth who seemed just rising to manhood, of 
graceful form, tall of stature, and Avith limbs of per- 
fect shape, lay sorely wounded upon the ground, lan- 
guid, pale, and bloody. Over him hung one in the 
habit of a page [art thou there, Truepenny?], 
younger, and still more exquisitely beautiful, piercing 
the air with lamentations, and eagerly employed in 
binding up the wounds of the fallen youth with locks 
of comely auburn, torn from a fair though dishevelled 
head. 

Clara Eeeve was influenced by this book, and 
made one of the few references to it that I have 
been able to find. In her Progress of Romance 
(1785), the following dialogue occurs: ''How 
is that, a Eomance in the 18th century r' 
''Yes, a Romance in reality and not a Novel.— 
A story like those of the middle ages, composed 
of Chivalry, Love, and Eeligion.'' After some 
detailed discussion, the remark is made, "This 
work is distinguished in my list, among Novels 
uncommon and Original.'' 

But it took a personage of more social pres- 



84 THE ADVANCE OF 

tige than the Eev. Thomas Leland to set the pace 
for romantic fiction. In 1764 appeared The 
Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, a worth- 
less hodge-podge of gloom and tinsel that threw 
England into a fever of excitement and is more 
responsible than any other one book for releas- 
ing the flood of tales of mystery. This is not in 
any real sense a forerunner of Scott, as Long- 
sword was; for it is a ^^gothic/^ not a historical 
romance. Horace Walpole, the thoroughly 
sophisticated man of the world, was the last per- 
son on earth, a priori, who should have written 
this turgid stuff ; but the paradox occurred sim- 
ply because Walpole was a man of fashion — 
of fads rather than fancies — and the new ro- 
manticism was in the air. Just as a conserv- 
ative person will wear flaunting and pictur- 
esque garments if they are the ^'latest thing,'' 
so authors and artists — ^whose real nature might 
be inclined even to cynical criticism — ^will some- 
times be the first to scent the new movement, 
and start a whole pack in the hue and cry. The 
fact that Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 85 

Otranto is the surest evidence of the approach- 
ing reign of Eomanticism. 

The analogy between architecture and litera- 
ture is a sound one; and as Horace Walpole 
had drawn the attention of London society to 
his ' ^ Gothic Castle ' ' at Strawberry Hill, so now 
he captured them anew with his Gothic romance, 
written in a style that would have made Quin- 
tilian stare and gasp. It had its origin in a 
dream — ^^a very natural dream for a head like 
mine filled with Gothic story" — and he began 
to write ^* without knowing in the least what I 
intended to say or relate." In the original 
edition he pretended that it was a translation 
of an old romance that he had found, but the 
sudden popularity of the work caused him to 
acknowledge the authorship in the second print- 
ing, where his preface contains a significant 
statement. **It was an attempt to blend the 
two kinds of romance, the ancient and the mod- 
ern. In the former, all was imagination and 
improbability ; in the latter, nature is always in- 
tended to be, and sometimes has been, copied 



86 THE ADVANCE OF 

with success. Invention has not been wanting ; 
but the great resources of fancy have been 
dammed up, by a strict adherence to common 
life.'' This last sentence shows that the ro- 
mantic sentiment in art is always the same; 
it is impatient of the bolts and bars of ex- 
perience, unwilling to submit either to rules of 
authority or to tests of fact, and wants a free 
hand. 

Even more remarkable than Walpole's 
authorship of such a story is Gray's critical ad- 
miration of it; and this once more can be ex- 
plained only by remembering that Thomas 
Gray, with all his shyness, with all his fastidious 
scholarship, had completely surrendered to the 
new Eomantic Movement. His unbounded ad- 
miration for the first fragments of Ossian 
(1760) made him an easy target, even for so 
poor a shot as Walpole ; for he welcomed at this 
time everything in literature that savoured of 
^^wildness." He had seen the manuscript, and 
advised his friend to print it ; and when the book 
appeared, he wrote to Walpole that it made peo- 
ple cry and afraid to go to bed o ' nights. Thus 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 87 

it produced the exact effect intended by all the 
works of this school — tears and terror — a com- 
bination of the school of sentiment with the 
school of mystery. 

Tales that were meant to be thrilling now be- 
gan to multiply ; and we read to-day with a smile 
what our ancestors read with rising hair. 
Familiarity breeds contempt; ^^d,.this is par- 
ticularly true of ghosts. They must not appear 
too often or in too large numbers. But the 
thirst of the public for the uncanny had been 
aroused, and the main business of the second 
and third rate novelists was then, even as it is 
now, to satisfy a thirst. Clara Eeeve's Old 
English Baron (1777), Ann Eadcliffe's Mys- 
teries of Udolpho (1794), and M. G. Lewis's 
The Monh (1795) are progressive examples of 
the fashion. Although not one of these books 
is worth reading for its own sake, they were a 
contribution to the stream of English fiction, 
and an evidence of the never-dying love of the 
English for romance. While great realistic 
novels, as faithful criticisms of life, may satisfy 
some of the people all of the time, and all of the 



88 THE ADVANCE OF 

people some of the time, they camiot satisfy all 
the people all the time. 

There is another reason to-day why we may 
be grateful to these mystery-mongers. Just as 
Pamela was the mother of Joseph Andrews, so 
these hobgoblins gave birth to another immortal 
burlesque — Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen 
was only twenty-two when she wrote this story ; 
and it was written in the flood-tide of the books 
it ridiculed, in the year 1798. In 1803 it was 
sold to a publisher in Bath, but perhaps the 
fashion in fiction was too strong for his cour- 
age, for he laid the manuscript away; years 
later, the family offered him the same amount 
that he had paid for the return of it; amazed 
and delighted, he lost no time in accepting. 
Then he was more amazed and less delighted 
by being informed of the author 's name, already 
famous. 

The sense of humour is the sure antidote for 
excessive sentiment and excessive improbabili- 
ties ; as is shown by trying melodrama on a uni- 
versity audience. A huge Gothic galleon of 
romance may be successfully torpedoed by one 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 89 

joke. Many literary movements have found 
their limit — even in the most patient nations — 
by finally colliding with the public sense of 
humour; and it is certain that if the sense of 
humour were as well developed in the Eussian 
people as the sense of tragedy, many of the con- 
temporary abnormal novels would disappear in 
a burst of foam. Jane Austen — the most clear- 
headed woman who ever wrote fiction — found 
the atmosphere somewhat overheated; and the 
good-natured laughter of Northanger Abhey 
was like a draught of fresh air. It blew out the 
candles and brought daylight back to English 
fiction. 

It is, of course, a good story well told, with 
real characters; but its purpose was to attack 
The Mysteries of UdolpJio and the whole 
fashion of romance represented by that work. 
The anti-climax of the washing-bill is a youthful 
burlesque ; but not content with this, in the sixth 
chapter we have Sir Charles Grandison rated 
above all the romances, together with a specific 
attack on Mrs. Eadcliif e 's tale. Apart from the 
historical interest of this satire, I find very in- 



90 THE ADVANCE OF 

tere sting the ironical treatment of the debutante 
of 1798; and I think a citation will prove that 
the twentieth century debutante has not radi- 
cally changed. 

Have you gone on with Udolphof 

Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and 
I am got to the black veil. 

Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would 
not tell you what is behind the black veil for the 
world ! Are not you wild to know ? 

Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell 
me. I would not be told on any account. I know 
it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina's 
skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I 
should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I 
assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would 
not have come away from it for all the world. 

Dear creature ! how much I am obliged to you ; and 
when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the 
Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten 
or twelve more of the same kind for you. 

Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are 
their names? 

I will read you their names directly ; here they are, 
in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfeiihach, Clermont, 
Mysterious Warnings, Necromancers of the Black 
Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and 
Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 91 

Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? are you 
sure they are all horrid? 

Yes, quite sure ; for a particular friend of mine, — 
a Miss Andrews, — a sweet girl, one of the sweetest 
creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I 
wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted 
with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak 
you can conceive. I think her as beautiful as an 
angel, and I am so vexed with the men for not admir- 
ing her! — I scold them all amazingly about it. 

There is nothing meretricious about Jane 
Austen except the alliterative titles of two of 
her novels ; she stopped that business after her 
first two books, and we read and reread Pride 
and Prejudice with such enthusiasm that we find 
no difficulty in forgiving the author for its chris- 
tening. For this work is one of the world's 
very few impeccable masterpieces. 

Miss Austen was an absolute realist, and 
each of her books is a profound and accurate 
criticism of life. Declining to write a historical 
romance she wrote to her foolish counsellor, ^^I 
could no more write a romance than an epic 
poem. I could not sit seriously down to write 
a serious romance under any other motive than 



92 .THE ADVANCE OF 

to save my life ; and if it were indispensable for 
me to keep it up and never relax into laughing 
at myself and other people, I am sure I should 
be hung before I had finished the first chapter. ' ^ 
Although it would be false to say that her 
aim in writing stories was a didactic one, it is 
nevertheless true that, in common with her mas- 
ter Eichardson, she meant to improve social 
manners, and her novels are in a sense books of 
etiquette. She was disgusted with the foolish 
and trivial and ill-written letters that passed 
between young girls in society; she was thor- 
oughly indignant with fond fathers and mothers 
who made their little children protagonists of 
the family drama, as is so often the case to-day ; 
she could not endure to have the children's con- 
versation quoted, to have the good talk of 
adults lowered to the level of infants who hap- 
pened to be in the room, nor to see a number of 
men and women surrounding a child, and talk- 
ing baby-talk to its unconscious face. And 
while she probably loved Elizabeth Bennet more 
than any other of her characters, saying play- 
fully of her, *^I must confess that I think her 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 93 

as cleliglitful a creature as ever appeared in 
print ; and liow I shall be able to tolerate those 
who do not like her at least, I do not know/' she 
perhaps meant Anne Elliott in Persuasion as 
her ideal of what a young girl should be. 

The change that has taken place in a hundred 
years, not merely in our ideal girl but in the 
girl-ideal, can happily be illustrated by compar- 
ing the Anne Elliott of Persuasion with the 
Anne Elliott of The Guest of Quesnay, written 
by our deservedly popular American novelist, 
Booth Tarkington. Both girls spell their name 
the same way; each is meant to be attractive 
and representative ; and the similarity of spell- 
ing together with the contrast in temperament 
made me feel certain that the comparison was 
intentional, until I was informed by Mr. Tark- 
ington that it was wholly unconscious. The 
modern girl is healthy and capable ; her face, 
neck, and hands are heavily tanned ; on the in- 
side of her hands there are callous mounds, 
caused by tennis, golf, and steering-wheels; 
much of the form divine is revealed by modern 
clothes ; her language is an epitome of the latest 



94 THE ADVANCE OF 

argot ; and Mr. Granville Barker says her walk, 
her gestures, and her manner are all an exact 
imitation of contemporary musical comedy. 
The attempt of most novelists is to make the 
heroine attractive; and I remember reading a 
review of Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers 
of Fortune, where in a discussion of how Hope 
Langham rose to a certain emergency, the re- 
viewer exclaimed, '^Hope did her stunt without 
a whimper. ' ' Now imagine Sophia Western — 
to illustrate from a very male novelist — doing 
her stunt without a whimper! Imagine Clar- 
issa driving a motor ! Why is it we never hear 
the word ^* Tomboy'' — so common in my youth 
— applied to the modern girl? Simply because 
all girls nowadays are tomboys. The late Mr. 
Lounsbury said that Cooper's heroines were a 
combination of propriety and incapacity. I 
would not say that the modern heroine is im- 
proper — ^but simply that she would have seemed 
so to her sister of a century agone. 

For the fact is, that just as there are styles 
in clothes so there are styles in character, in 
manners, yes, in the female body. In the twen- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 95 

tieth century thin girls are all the rage, so that 
the reputation of Kubens as a painter has sunk 
to such a depth that even the most ignorant 
American tourists know that he is not to be 
praised. This has not always been the case; 
Charles Eeade did not hesitate to give the leg 
of Christie Johnstone a ^^noble swell'' ; he would 
pare her down to-day. The modern heroine is 
thin to angularity; when meant to be very at- 
tractive, her figure is called ^^ boyish"; and 
among the many trials of women, I should think 
the necessity of changing their bodies to fit 
fashionable requirements was not the least. 
Bad enough to have such caprices in garments ; 
but to have your figure out of style ! Still, it is 
not so bad as being a dog ; for if you are a dog 
and are not in style, you simply are not born at 
all. You cease to exist. "What has become of 
all the coach-dogs and Spitz dogs of my youth ? 
They went out of style and out of life simul- 
taneously. 

Now the eighteenth century fashionable girl 
was most gentle, most proper, most retiring. 
Her chief charm was delicacy ; and if she had a 



96 THE ADVANCE OF 

touch of tuberculosis, she became irresistible. 
This was the kind of young woman worshipped 
by our ancestors; to whom the modern Booth 
Tarkington girl would have been physically re- 
pulsive, as repulsive as an aggressively mannish 
woman is still. Does it seem incredible that a 
whole generation of males can differ from an- 
other generation in their admiration of women, 
and in their susceptibility? Such is never- 
theless a fact. Fenimore Cooper, whose '*fe- 
males^' are a mark for modern satire, was sim- 
ply carrying the eighteenth century ideal to its 
limit. America has always been more conserv- 
ative than England ; perhaps for the same rea- 
son that a bourgeoise is much more careful 
in her ** company manners'' than a duchess. 
Cooper's heroines, like real eighteenth century 
ladies, faint with the greatest ease and with per- 
fect technique; and as to their modesty, our 
novelist said of one of his creations, ^'on one 
occasion her little foot moved," although ^*she 
had been carefully taught too that even this 
beautiful portion of the female frame should be 
quiet and unobtrusive." Many readers, impa- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 97 

tient at such drivel, think that Cooper must 
have been an ass. He was nothing of the kind; 
he was following the fashion. If he should re- 
visit the glimpses of the moon, it would be worth 
while to guide him to Atlantic City or Coney 
Island. 

Although the boldest of eighteenth century 
reformers would have been shocked by our mod- 
ern girls, the ideal of physical incompetence 
and shy delicacy did not maintain its supremacy 
without a protest. And, as Professor Cross has 
shown, the first real rebellion broke out in that 
marvellous monitor of youth, Sand ford and 
Merton (1783-1789) , by Thomas Day. No sickly 
females for him! *'She rises at candle light in 
winter, plunges into a cold bath, rides a dozen 
miles upon a trotting horse or walks as many 
even with the hazard of being splashed or soil- 
ing her clothes ..." Jane Austen had so 
much common sense that she meant her Eliza- 
beth to be a rebuke to the over-fastidious. '*To 
walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, 
or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and 
alone, quite alone! wjaat could she mean by it? 



98 THE ADVANCE OF 

It seems to me to show an abominable sort of 
conceited independence, a most country-town 
indifference to decorum." 

Although Jane Austen's robust contempo- 
rary, Walter Scott, sometimes made his hero- 
ines act and talk in a way that seems to us 
insipid, his best girls are full of vigour, both of 
body and of mind. Mr. Saintsbury had the 
courage to name five nineteenth-century women 
whom he would have been glad to marry. They 
are Elizabeth Bennet, of Pride and Prejudice; 
Diana Vernon, of Rob Roy; Beatrix Esmond; 
Argemone Lavington, of Yeast; and Barbara 
G-rant, of David Balfour, Most of these girls, 
while not reaching the cover standard of the 
contemporary American magazine, are active 
and capable ; and among all of Scott 's creations, 
it is notable that the modern critic selected Di 
Vernon, the all-around athlete. 

The Romantic Eevival of the eighteenth cen- 
tury reached a tremendous climax in Walter 
Scott. By virtue of his immense power and 
range, and unlimited creative activity, he re- 
mains the King of Romanticists. He belongs 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 99 

of course to the objective side of romanticism, 
as Byron belongs to the subjective ; Scott is ro- 
mantic in liis material, Byron romantic in his 
mood. The great streams of Gothicism, Chiv- 
alry, and Mystery, as seen in architecture, bal- 
lads, and wild fiction, all united in the work of 
the Wizard. His achievement in prose romance 
is incomparably better than that of all his imme- 
diate predecessors put together, and had indeed 
no equal in English literature since the time of 
Malory. 

Scott is the great impromptu in fiction, as 
^Browning is in poetry; all of his work seems 
(extempore. Naturally, therefore, he does not 

6 

I serve as a model of style. Stevenson, who had 
I nothing but adoration for Scott's character, and 
his marvellous inventive powers, never forgave 
him for his carelessness in manner. ^*It is un- 
deniable," said he, **that the love of the slap- 
dash and the shoddy grew upon Scott with suc- 
cess.'' Of one of his sentences, Stevenson 
remarked, *' A man who gave in such copy would 
be discharged from the staff of a daily 
paper. . . . How comes it, then, that he could 



100 THE ADVANCE OP 

so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate 
twaddle?'^ 

Mark Twain, a careful and painstaking artist, 
had nothing but contempt for Scott until he hap- 
pened to read Quentin Durward. He had been 
ridiculing the professors and the critics for 
their praise of Sir Walter, insisting that the so- 
called great man not only was insufferably dull, 
but that he did not even know how to write. 
Then he read Quentin Durward, which fasci- 
nated him so powerfully that he playfully in- 
sisted it had come from another hand. While it 
was impossible for Mark Twain to write any 
essay in criticism without grotesque exaggera- 
tion, there is some truth both in his condemna- 
tion of Scott and in the exception noted. If I 
were condemned to read all of Scott's novels 
again (a fearful punishment) I should look upon 
Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe, The Bride of Lam- 
mermoor, and Kenilworth as notable mitiga- 
tions. Indeed, for sheer dramatic power. The 
Bride of Lammermoor is one of the greatest 
romances in the world. Many years ago. Sir 
William Eraser was engaged in a warm discus- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 101 

sion of Scott with Bulwer-Lytton. Finally, Sir 
William proposed that each man write on a slip 
of paper what he conceived to be Scott's mas- 
terpiece, at the same time expressing the utmost 
confidence that they would write the same title. 
They did ; it was The Bride of Lammermoor, 

Many of Scott's novels I find unreadable. I 
cannot get through the underbrush. Over and 
over again I have attacked Woodstock, always 
in vain, and I shall never try any more. What 
is there about such dreary romances, filled with 
long descriptions and interminable meander- 
ings, that conquers children? When I was a 
child, I read Scott and Cooper with intense in- 
terest, never skipping a word. I rose before 
dawn to read Cooper's Two Admirals, thinking 
of it with anticipatory delight as I fell asleep; 
I should exact favourable terms for reading it 
now. 

Scott, like all the great Eomantics, was a 
mighty man, and much of his production has im- 
mortal life. Somehow a writer may be a great 
realist and yet not impress us with his vi- 
tality; may indeed seem anaemic. But the 



102 THE ADVANCE OF 

great Eomantics — Scott, Victor Hugo, Dumas, 
Cooper, Sienkiewicz, — men who find this world 
too cramped, and are forced to make their own 
world, where they can have elbow-room — these 
always give the impression of endless force. 
The physical exception, Stevenson, had such 
amazing mental vitality that if his bodily frame 
had been powerful, he would probably never 
have written a line; would perhaps have gone 
to perdition by the shortest available route. 
Eeaders who knew nothing of him always 
imagined him healthily robust. The other Eo- 
mantics had concealed within their mortal clay 
some inextinguishable fire ; on the coldest winter 
day, Dumas would sit by an open window with 
his coat off, writing novels, while the sweat 
poured down his face. Victor Hugo, when he 
ate a lobster, ate it all, insisting that the hard 
shell aided his digestion, as he crumpled it in 
his strong teeth. When he ate an orange, he 
ate it as a boy eats an apple, skin and all. The 
great Eomantics are supermen. 

And this vital flame blazes forever in their 
masterpieces. Why is it that so many of our 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 103 

modern romances, wMch sell for some years by 
the hundred thousand, disappear with a rapidity 
that must to their authors be disconcerting, 
while The Three MusJceteers, Ivanhoe, Notre 
Dame, and The Last of the Mohicans are being 
read by thousands of people while I am writing 
this sentence? It is because, with all their 
carelessness of diction, with all their blemishes 
and incongruities, they are rattling good stories ; 
stories that, told in the crudest manner about a 
campfire, would hold every auditor breathless; 
and because they contain characters so filled 
with the breath of life that a reader can no more 
forget them than he could forget his most in- 
timate friend. 



CHAPTEE V 

THE MID-VICTOKIANS 

The greatest decade in English fiction — hunting in couples 
— Dickens — his popularity in Russia — Thackeray the senti- 
mentalist — George Eliot — which is her best novel*? — Anthony 
Trollope and his twentieth century reincarnation — few great 
women novelists — the Bronte sisters — smouldering passion 
'. — invention and imagination — Wilkie Collins — Conan Doyle 
— superiority of Americans in the short story — Irving, Poe, 
Hawthorne, Harte, 0. Henry — contemporary Russian mas- 
ters of the short story — reticence and dignity in American 
art. 

Perhaps the greatest decade in the history of 
the English Novel was the period between 
1850 and 1860 inclusive. The list of titles is 
more impressive than any comment thereupon. 
David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, 
A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Pen- 
dennis, Esmond, The Newcomes, The Virgin- 
ians, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The 
Mill on the Floss/ Alton Locke^ Eypatia, West- 
ward Ho, Peg Woffington, Christie Johnstone, 
It Is Never Too Late to Mend, The Cloister 

104 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 105 

and the Hearth, The Warden, Barchester Tow- 
ers, Doctor Thome, The Woman in White, 
Villette, The Professor, Tom Brown's School 
Days, John Halifax, The Ordeal of Richard 
Fever el, The Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven 
Gables, Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, 
Uncle Tom's Cabin. In order to find a parallel 
to such a rapid production of masterpieces in 
English literature, we should have to go back 
to the best days of the Elizabethan drama. The 
mid- Victorian publishers lived in the golden 
age: and their regular announcements — ^which 
make interesting reading in the advertising 
pages of old weeklies — ^must have aroused 
golden anticipations. 

In one hundred years from Clarissa, Tom 
Jones, and Roderick Random, the novel had ad- 
vanced to full maturity, with the complexity and 
technique that accompany the complete develop- 
ment of any form of art. 

Great writers often come in pairs, and hunt 
the public in couples. Eichardson and Field- 
ing, Scott and Jane Austen, Dickens and Thack- 
eray, Hardy and Meredith,. Tennyson and 



106 THE ADVANCE OF 

Browning, Goethe and Schiller, Turgenev and 
Tolstoi, Ibsen and Bjornson, Hauptmann and 
Sudermann — to mention only some of the mod- 
ern instances. A good thing this twinning 
seems to be for literature; genius echoes gen- 
ius, and each rival spurs the other to his best. 

Scott died in 1832; and within four years 
Englishmen were reading Pickwick Papers, the 
inspired writing of a new novelist, who had two 
great qualities not mainly characteristic of Sir 
Walter — ^humour and humanitarianism. Never 
was a man more kind to individuals than the 
great Scot; but his professional work resem- 
bles a long picture gallery, whereas the novels 
of Dickens make one glorified stump speech, 
abounding in sympathy for the outcasts, and 
shining with fun. No voice like this had ever 
been heard in English Literature ; and for thirty 
'years after his death, his silence was almost 
audible, till he returned to earth and dwelt 
among us as William De Morgan. 

Of all British novelists, none has been more 
purely creative than Dickens ; his tears flow from 
the great source, the sentimental novel of the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 107 

eighteenth century, the only link between him 
and Sterne; but the pathos of Dickens is what 
the twentieth century finds least admirable in 
his work. He regarded his own childhood with 
considerable and justifiable self-pity; but his 
unfathomable tenderness is shown with espe- 
cial force toward all children. The sufferings 
of little boys and girls made to him an irre- 
sistible appeal; and he felt that the death of a 
child was the most tragic event in nature, as 
Poe thought the death of a young girl the most 
poetically and romantically beautiful. Dickens 
insisted on the inherent dignity of childhood — 
a dignity constantly outraged both by the sel- 
fishness and by the condescension of adults. 
// Although Dickens had an enormous influence 
on the literature of the Continent, the only for- 
eign novelist who resembled him both in genius 
and in temperament was Dostoevski. The title 
of one of the latter 's stories, The Insulted and 
Injured, might almost be taken as the subject 
of the complete works of both writers. Both 
had suffered terribly in earliest youth; both 
knew the city slums ; both knew the very worst 



108 THE ADVANCE OF 

of wMcli humanity is capable; both loved hu- 
manity with a love that survived every experi- 
ence; both were profoundly spiritual, intensely 
religious, and thoroughly optimistic. For the 
great artists who have known suffering and 
privation are more often optimists than those 
whose lives have been carefully sheltered. The 
game of life seems to be more enjoyed by those 
who play it than by those who look on. 

Tolstoi and Dostoevski read Dickens with 
eagerness and profit. Dickens has been and is 
to-day more popular in Kussia than any other 
English novelist ; the common people feel their 
kinship to him in the touch of nature. In one 
of the Siberian provincial jails, where records 
are always kept of the prisoners' reading, the 
library minutes for 1914 are interesting. Of 
British authors in Eussian translations, Dick- 
ens was called for 192 times; Scott, 98; Wells, 
53 ; Wilde, 44 ; Kipling, 41 ; Shakespeare, 33. 

In the history of British fiction, Dickens fills 
the biggest place, contributed the largest num- 
ber of permanently interesting characters, owed 
less to other authors than any other novelist, 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 109 

and would be the one I should keep if all but one 
had to perish. No other writer has made so 
great a contribution to the greatest happiness 
of the greatest number ; and while it is possible 
to contemplate the history of the novel minus 
any other author, we simply cannot get along 
without Dickens. The extraordinary succes- 
sion of masterpieces that he produced with 
hardly any lapses for thirty years put the whole 
world hopelessly in his debt. He was the most 
creative and the least critical of all our writers 
of fiction; he attempted no formal essays; his 
American Notes ought not to have been written, 
and his Child^s History of England would have 
blighted the reputation of a lesser man. It is 
absurd to call his characters mere caricatures: 
he turned the powerful searchlight of his mind 
into many dark places, and his persons stand 
out against the background in a conspicuous 
glare. But if these people are not true, why is 
it that all observers since 1840 are continually 
pointing out persons who ^4ook like characters 
from Dickens ' ' I 
Although the middle of the nineteenth cen- 



110 THE ADVANCE OF 

tury saw tlie Novel playing successfully the 
role of life's interpreter, nearly every promi- 
nent writer felt bound to produce one historical 
romance. Dickens lacked everything but imag- 
ination in this field, and to me A Tale of Two 
Cities is the poorest of all his stories, with the 
one exception of Little Dorrit. As soon as he 
had shaken himself free from it, he wrote one 
of the best novels in English literature — Great 
Expectations; even as Stevenson, flinging aside 
St. Ives, produced the unfinished masterpiece. 
Weir of Hermiston, George Eliot also failed; 
when all is said, Romola is a work of construc- 
tion rather than creation, more ponderous than 
splendid. And as a study of moral decay, it is 
not so impressive as Mr. Howells's Modern In- 
stance, Charles Eeade was so successful, how- 
ever, that The Cloister and the Hearth is worth 
all the rest of his works put together — I wonder 
if he realised before he died how immensely 
better it is ? And it seems now, as if Westward 
Ho would outlast the more sensational and 
formerly more popular Hypatia. For Charles 
Kingsley was an Elizabethan by nature, and 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 111 

was more at home with the seadogs of Devon- 
shire than in a joint debate with Newman. It 
remained for Thackeray to write the best his- 
torical romance in our language, Esmond, 

This book is almost entirely free from 
Thackeray's worst faults: his sentimentalism, 
his diffuseness, his personal intrusions on the 
stage. The story is told in the first person, 
which shut out the author: it was published as 
a whole in book form instead of being dragged 
out in monthly numbers ; and it is a narrative 
so full of passion— real passions, love, jealousy, 
lust, revenge, — that there is no room for any- 
thing less vital. He wrote Esmond at white 
heat in a short time, and the manuscript shows 
few corrections. I like it best because it con- 
tains the best of Thackeray— and the best of 
Thackeray has not been surpassed in English 
fiction. 

Thackeray's mind was more critical than that 
of Dickens : he was a natural-born critic, paro- 
dist, burlesquer, commentator. He walked the 
garden of this world and his novels — except Es- 
mond — are gigantic commentaries on what he 



112 THE ADVANCE OF 

saw. Never was a writer less of a cynic and 
satirist than Thackeray; no doubt, like many 
people, he thought he was very severe ; but as a 
matter of fact, he was a sentimentalist and a 
preacher, who loved humanity, saw its follies 
with the sharp sight of the humourist, and 
wished all the time that he could say something 
to make his readers profit by his personally con- 
ducted tours. 

He was a chivalrous, magnanimous, tender- 
hearted, essentially noble character ; no English 
novelist has ever better deserved the grand old 
name of gentleman. He confessed his sins 
against art like a man. ^^ Perhaps of all the 
novel-spinners now extant, the present speaker 
is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not 
stop perpetually in his story and begin to preach 
to youf He really missed the point of the ob- 
jection to this practice. It is not that we are 
eager to hear what happened next and want no 
interruption: it is that these interruptions de- 
stroy the illusion, and are, from the artistic 
point of view, deplorably insincere. For this 
reason, I find The Newcomes an unreadable 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 113 

book. He wrote it frankly for cash, and said 
so. 

Of the three great mid- Victorians, George 
Eliot was less rich in natural endowment than 
either Dickens or Thackeray, but wrote with 
more soberness of mind. She said she was 
neither pessimist nor optimist, but called her- 
self a meliorist. Be this as it may, her books 
were all written in shadow, and have none of 
the abounding cheerfulness of Dickens, nor the 
lambent humour of Thackeray. Her humour, of 
which she had a plenty, was grave and ironical ; 
no one has better depicted middle-aged women 
who combine vacuity of intellect with venomous 
selfishness. In fact I think no novelist has ever 
better depicted the unloveliness and corroding 
force of selfishness. 

In true human pathos, her Scenes of Clerical 
Life were a revelation in English literature. 
"What an enormous contrast between these 
depths of tragedy and the eighteenth century 
pools of sentiment ! The restraint shown by 
the author emphasised the dignity of suffering. 
And one has only to compare young Maggie 



114 THE ADVANCE OF 

Tulliver with Little Nell to see George Eliot at 
her best and Dickens at his worst. The con- 
stant attrition under which Maggie suffered is 
more painfully real to us than NelPs melodra- 
matic and elaborate preparations for the tomb. 
The Mill on the Floss leaves the tricks of 
realism and enters the field of reality. It is a 
noble, permanent example of the psychological 
novel, which had been started by Eichardson. 
It would be difficult to find outside of Turgenev 
any love scenes in fiction which combine less 
carnality with more passion than the scenes be- 
tween Stephen and Maggie. And it is not sur- 
prising that Turgenev admired this book. For 
once upon a time three men, Mr. George H. 
Lewes, Professor Boyesen of Columbia, and the 
Eussian Turgenev were engaged in a warm dis- 
cussion as to which one of George Eliot's 
novels was the best. Mr. Lewes declared for 
Daniel Deronda, the husband naturally thinking 
her latest was her finest; Professor Boyesen 
voted for Middlemarch, as being richest in con- 
tent ; but the great Eussian, who valued correct 
analysis and profound sincerity above all other 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 115 

qualities in fiction, gave his opinion for The 
Mill on the Floss, I think Time is on his 
side. 

George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, is 
over-weighted with opinion and propaganda, 
and is visibly sinking beneath the surface of 
literature. I wish I knew how many people 
had read it through in 1915! She wrote no 
more novels, and I do not think she could have 
written another. The best scenes in this book 
are the terrifying conversations between Grand- 
court and Gwendolen, which I have always sus- 
pected were inspired by Browning's poem. Mi/ 
Last Duchess. The refinement of cruelty is so 
truthfully portrayed that one shudders as if 
present at a scene of torture. 

Anthony Trollope's Autobiography is more 
interesting than his stories, and more improh- 
able. There has never existed a less preten- 
tious artist. He tells us exactly how his work 
was done, and we know nothing whatever about 
it. He said he would not be read in the twen- 
tieth century, but he is; even the enormous 
amount of his production — I saw an edition in 



116 THE ADVANCE OF 

eighty-eight volumes — has not swamped his 
reputation. Hawthorne's criticism of him ac- 
counts for his permanence; his novels are just 
like life, some of them being so dull that we fly 
to other books. No one would dare call Trol- 
lope a genius, and he would have ridiculed such 
an appellation. It is rather singular that this 
uninspired Englishman, in a grey business suit, 
is so much more conspicuous in the history of 
fiction than many gesticulating sensationalists 
like Hall Caine; and it will be food for reflec- 
tion if he should eventually outlast so brilliant 
a dandy as Bulwer-Lytton. 

Anthony Trollope has had a curious and alto- 
gether charming reincarnation in the twentieth 
century in the person of Archibald Marshall, 
whose novels may be confidently recommended 
to admirers of Barchester Towers. Where does 
Mr. Marshall get that skill — absent from Eng- 
lish literature since Trollope 's death — of rep- 
resenting ordinary events and ordinary char- 
acters, not one of whom is wholly good or wholly 
bad, in a way that makes the reader follow with 
tense interest, unwilling to skip a word? The 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 117 

trilogy of the Clinton family, and Exton Manor, 
The Greatest of These, The Old Order Chang- 
eth are good stories well told — I for one wish 
they were twice as long. These books have not 
got the ^^ punch,'' nor any *^red blood," nor any 
lubricity or vulgarity. Strangest of all quali- 
ties, they are filled with charming, decent, well- 
bred, kindly, human people, so that to read 
these novels is like visiting in a good home. In- 
stead of being forced to associate with dull, 
coarse, dirty loafers, whom one would not pick 
for acquaintances in every day life, the reader 
is brought into contact with extremely attrac- 
tive men and women. No one ought to quarrel 
with Mr. Marshall for his principle of choice — 
since readers and critics who prefer to spend 
their time in the slums, in the antiseptically 
safe way of realistic fiction, have constant and 
abundant opportunity to do so. I think that 
it is more difficult to write any one of Mr. Mar- 
shall's novels than it is to produce the vast 
majority of tales dealing with criminals and 
abnormal villains. And our contemporary 
TroUope is really *^true to life"; for the world 



118 THE ADVANCE OF 

does actually contain some persons wiiom it is 
a pleasure to meet. 

-'^ It is a rather curious fact that in the history 
of fiction in all languages, only two women have 
risen to the first rank — Jane Austen and George 
Eliot. This is the more odd because the art of 
the novel is to a certain extent imitative and 
critical, not nearly so purely creative as the 
art of musical composition, where no women 
of genius have ever appeared. Although not 
to be compared with the two names I have men- 
tioned, the three Bronte sisters still have a place 
of their own in English literature. Anne now 
shines only by reflected light; few read Agnes 
Grey, and none would read it were she not the 
sister of Charlotte and Emily. The latter had 
perhaps the greatest natural endowment of the 
three ; and WutJiering Heights, while more hys- 
terical than historical in its treatment of human 
nature, has at any rate the strength of delirium. 
It was written by one who had passed, like old 
Dr. Donne, through the straits of fever — per 
f return fehris. It is short-sighted criticism that 
wonders at the mental range of passion of a girl 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 119 

shut up in dreary loneliness ; her capacity for 
expression is what is remarkable, her passion- 
ate intensity exactly what one might expect 
from such stifling repression. It is ridiculous 
to believe that a woman ^s passions are passive 
and not active ; that she is unaware of them un- 
til some man appears on the scene ; or that even 
then her love is the love of reciprocation, that 
cannot be roused independently of purposeful 
masculine attention. Such ideas may make a 
fancy virginal picture pleasing to some per- 
sons, but they are exactly contrary to the facts 
of human nature. The recent publication of 
Charlotte's love-letters ought to open the ears 
of the deaf; but then, if they hear not Moses 
and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded 
though one rose from the dead. 

Emily's narrow bodily existence fanned the 
flames in her soul; and she could have counted 
herself a queen of infinite space, had she not 
had bad dreams. 

Charlotte Bronte used in her novels her 
Yorkshire and her Continental experiences ; but 
chiefly when she wrote, she looked into her 



120 THE ADVANCE OF 

heart, as is indeed tlie way with most novelists 
of distinction. Most novels are really auto- 
biographies, and did we know as much about the 
external and spiritual life of all writers of fic- 
tion as we do of Tolstoi's, I think we should find 
often an equally faithful following of experi- 
ence, though with less genius for recording it. 
Charlotte and her sister Emily wrote novels of 
revolt, expressing the hatred of that conven- 
tionality submitted to by so many women with 
such inner dissenting repugnance; for conven- 
tionality is such a tyranny that its bonds often 
become galling to women, every one of whom 
has the love of adventure in her heart ; the de- 
sire for some thrilling excursion of the soul. 
Men of desperate valour seem to appeal to 
women more than those who are wise and pru- 
dent. No woman can endure a man who has 
too much caution. The little school-mistress in 
Quality Street loved the * ^dashing'' officer — 
loved him and no other. 

The fiery energy of Charlotte Bronte caused 
Jane Eyre to attract as much attention as a con- 
flagration; it blazes still. She is a torch in lit- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 121 

erature rather than a fixed star. After she is 
extinguished the world will still be reading 
Pride and Prejudice and Silas Marner. To 
turn even now from Jane Eyre to these books 
is like passing from a vivid dream to reality. 

Professor Brander Matthews has somewhere 
or other called attention to the distinction be- 
tween invention and imagination, showing that 
while we may admire the cleverness of great in- 
ventive ingenuity, and while this gift may be- 
stow upon its author immense temporary vogue, 
it does not, never has, and cannot place him 
with the immortal gods. A story ought to be 
the foundation of a novel ; but a novel does not 
become immortal through a good plot. An ex- 
cellent illustration of this is seen if one places 
side by side Wilkie Collins and George Eliot. 
As an inventor and manipulator of plot intrica- 
cies, we knew not the equal of Collins till Conan 
Doyle appeared. The Woman in White, Arma- 
dale, The Moonstone — marvellous, indeed, is the 
construction of these books. I sometimes think 
I have never seen a plot anywhere that rivalled 
in successful complexity the plot of The Moon- 



122 THE ADVANCE OF 

stone. Suppose a good talker were to attempt 
to amuse and excite an audience by telling in 
his own fashion the outline of a famous novel — 
think of the contrast for such a purpose illus- 
trated by The Moonstone and The Mill on the 
Floss! Yet there is not the slightest doubt that 
the latter is so much greater in literature that 
the two cannot even be named together. Col- 
lins was amazingly clever; each of his stories 
was an enigma, a delightful puzzle offered to 
the public. They brought him a vast number 
of readers and no fame — for Collins has no real 
fame ; he hardly belongs to literature at all, ex- 
cept as a striking example of the school of mys- 
tery and horror. He felt himself that he was 
only an entertainer, and he made an effort to 
write a * 'purpose" novel, which he accom- 
plished in Man and Wife, an attack upon college 
athletics and the marriage laws; but the only 
interest of this book is in its ingenuity. Critics 
would no more place Collins on a level with 
George Eliot, no, nor with Anthony Trollope, 
than they would rank on the platform a sleight- 
of-hand magician with Daniel Webster. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 123 

The wonderful mystery-criminal tales, 
dressed out in such gorgeous style by Poe, were 
developed prodigiously by Collins, who in our 
day has been almost obliterated from view by 
Conan Doyle. It would be difficult to exagger- 
ate the popularity of this author. Sherlock 
Holmes is at this moment one of the best-known 
fictitious characters that has ever been created. 
And he is known in all languages, he has ap- 
peared on the stage in all countries. The Eus- 
sians and the Japanese know their lean detect- 
ive as well as the English. And yet, despite 
this universal vogue, despite our pleasure in 
these blood-curdling tales, despite our gratitude 
to the author for so many hours of delightful 
bewilderment, what would happen to the critic 
who should rank him among the great British 
novelists, or associate him in letters with an- 
other living Englishman, Thomas Hardy? 

Such a state of things arouses reflection. It 
is clear that there must be something besides 
cleverness, even diabolical cleverness, to win 
anything like permanent fame. 

In comparison between British and American 



124 THE ADVANCE OF 

novelists — ^whether one takes the nineteenth or 
the twentieth century — the patriotic American 
would suffer actual pain, were it not that the 
more patriotic a person is the more incapable 
he is of seeing the truth. Love is blind, love of 
country stone-blind. But however harsh the 
contrast in the domain of the novel, there is a 
special province where America has actually ex- 
celled England. This is seen in the production 
of the Short Story, a species of art quite differ- 
ent, as has been pointed out, from the story that 
is short. Silas Marner is a story that is short, 
but not a Short Story ; The Gold Bug is a Short 
Story. Our first humourist, Washington Irv- 
ing, occasionally attained unto perfection in this 
difficult field. For in Rip Van WinUe and in 
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow his narrative is 
so good and his technique so perfect that the 
world has agreed to regard these two as imper- 
ishable classics. Irving 's pathos seems thin 
and flat to-day, and many of his meditative mus- 
ings are staled by custom; but his humour, 
quite English rather than American, is genuine, 
and a marvellous preservative. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL' 125 

A world-genius followed Irving — Edgar Al- 
lan Poe. Poe's tales of mystery, in comparison 
with Cooper's tales of adventure, illustrate the 
analogy of the lyric and the epic. This analogy 
will not usually hold good; because the lyric 
represents one mood and is usually subjective, 
whereas Guy de Maupassant's short stories, for 
example, represent a variety of moods and are 
as near objectivity as it was possible for their 
gifted author to make them. But Poe was 
really a lyrical poet by nature ; and the best of 
his short stories are almost perfect examples of 
prose lyrics. This becomes instantly apparent 
in reading The Fall of the House of Usher and 
(my own favourite) Ligeia, The sombre mood 
prevails, and rises to an agonising climax ex- 
actly as Tennyson's meditative rapture reaches 
a climax of passion in Tears, Idle Tears. The 
perfection of Poe 's art, joined with the thrilling 
suspense of his plots, made him a world-figure, 
a fruitful influence in all countries. No foreign 
writer has reached the level of Poe's best work 
in the analysis of the passion he made his 
specialty — fear. 



126 THE ADVANCE OF ^ 

This level, however, is not the highest level. 
That was reached by Hawthorne,^ whose moral 
grasp of the realities of life gave to his short 
stories a firmer foundation and a broader and 
more lasting appeal. For while I have never 
outgrown Poe, I find that many others have, if 
they are telling the truth about it ; it is impossi- 
ble for any one to outgrow Hawthorne. The 
difference between Poe and Hawthorne is the 
difference between the uncanny and the spir- 
itual ; in human emotion, it is the difference be- 
tween realism and reality. Poe makes our flesh 
creep with sensations; Hawthorne penetrates 
into the depths of our souls. Hawthorne used 
only the smallest fraction of his material; and 
to understand his method and his aim, it is 
necessary to read only Ethan Brand. 

Bret Harte was another master of the short 
story, and a germinal writer as well. He found 
more gold in California than any of the miners, 
and he had a private mint of his own, by which 
he made it current coin, good wherever the soul 
of man is precious. His two best tales, The 
Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 127 

Poher Flat J are as vivid now as then; their 
drama and their pathos are real, approaching 
the line of melodrama and sentimentality with- 
out once stepping over. 

In North Carolina they have just erected a 
statue to ''0. Henry." He was a profoundly 
sincere artist, as is shown, not only in his fin- 
ished work, but in his private correspondence. 
His worst defect was a fear and hatred of con- 
ventionality ; he had such mortal terror of stock 
phrases, that as some one has said, he wrote no 
English at all— he wrote the dot, dash, tele- 
graphic style. Yet leaving aside all his per- 
versities and his whimsicalities, and the poorer 
part of his work where the desire to be original 
is more manifest than any valuable result of it, 
there remain a sufficient number of transcripts 
from life and interpretations of it to give him 
abiding fame. There is a humorous tender- 
ness in The Wliirligig of Life, and profound 
ethical passion in A Blackjack Bargainer. A 
highly intelligent though unfavourable criticism 
of Porter that came to me in a private letter— I 
wish it might be printed— condemns him for the 



128 THE ADVANCE OF 

vagaries of his plots, which remind my corre- 
spondent of the quite serious criticism he read 
in a Philadelphia newspaper, which spoke of 
**the interesting but hardly credible adventures 
of Ulysses.'^ Now hyperbole is a great Amer- 
ican failing; and Porter was so out and out 
American that this disease of art raised 
blotches on his work. Yet his best emphasis is 
placed where it belongs. 

No writer of distinction has, I think, been 
more closely identified with the short story in 
English than 0. Henry. Irving, Poe, Haw- 
thorne, Bret Harte, Stevenson, Kipling attained 
fame in other fields; but although Porter had 
his mind fully made up to launch what he hoped 
would be the great American novel, the veto of 
death intervened, and the many volumes of his 
** complete works" are made up of brevities. 
The essential truthfulness of his art is what 
gave his work immediate recognition, and ac- 
counts for his rise from journalism to litera- 
ture. There is poignancy in his pathos; deso- 
lation in his tragedy; and his extraordinary 
humour is full of those sudden surprises that 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 129 

give us delight. Uncritical readers have never 
been so deeply impressed with 0. Henry as have 
the professional, jaded critics, weary of the old 
trick a thousand times repeated, who found in 
his writings a freshness and originality amount- 
ing to genius. 

Among the thousands of short stories written 
by lesser Americans than the five mentioned 
above, two by Eichard Harding Davis will cer- 
tainly be read for many years to come — Galla- 
gher, the wonderful boy who *^beat the town," 
and The Bar Sinister, which seems already to 
have won its way into the select canine classics 
of the world. 

Eussia, a country that has taught the world 
more about realistic novels than any other, and 
which has supplied the world with the best il- 
lustrations of the art, has also been pre-eminent 
for the last hundred years in the short story, 
her later writers achieving their highest fame 
in this field. Pushkin, the founder of modern 
Eussian literature, is the originator, as seen in 
his ** other harmony" of prose; Gogol's Over- 
coat had more influence on succeeding writers 



130 THE ADVANCE OF 

than any other work; Turgenev's Sportsman's 
Sketches are beautiful specimens and exerted a 
powerful moral influence as well; Tolstoi ^s 
short stories are among the best ever written, 
inspired by the New Testament parables, which 
are themselves incomparable, the absolute de- 
spair of modern art; after Tolstoi, the most 
notable master of the short story in Eussian is 
Chekhov, whose influence is just beginning to 
be felt in America ; and if any one feels a doubt 
as to the excellence of the modern Eussians, 
one should read Gar shin's Four Days, An- 
dreev's Silence, Gorki's Twenty -six Men and a 
Girl, and Artsybashev's Nina. Every Eussian 
novelist of distinction has written admirable 
short stories except Dostoevski. As the Amer- 
ican defect is humorous exaggeration, so the 
Eussian defect is tragic exaggeration — it might 
be a wholesome corrective for each nation to 
study the best art of the other. Unfortunately, 
though quite naturally, the only American short 
stories that are really popular in Eussia are 
the evil dreams of Edgar Allan Poe. 
Although we have no young Americans who 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 131 

can compare with Andreev, Sologub, Artsy- 
bashev, Gorki, Knprin, there is one respect in 
which American short stories and indeed all 
American fiction in general show superiority 
to the Russian ; and I am fully aware that what 
I regard as our chief merit is precisely the thing 
for which we are most stridently condemned. 
I mean our reserve in depicting the passion of 
sex. We have been scourged for this not only 
by foreign writers, but by many of our ** ad- 
vanced" journalists; it is incidentally well to 
remember that not one of these American men 
and women who ridicule the work of Mr. 
Howells and Mr. James has ever written any- 
thing that approaches it in literary distinction. 
We ought not to be ashamed of the American 
reverence before the mystery of passion; we 
ought to regard it with pride. We have 
scarcely any outrageously indecent authors, 
whose work, common enough in Europe, bears 
about the same relation to true art that a boy's 
morbid sketches on fences bear to Michael An- 
gelo's frescoes. Indecency is not necessarily 
sincerity. Instead of omitting the motif of 



132 THE ENGLISH NOVEL ' 

passion in art, instead of ignorance, timidity, or 
prudishness, our American reticence really in- 
dicates a better appreciation of its tremendous 
force. For as Henry James once pointed out, 
the silence of the American before the mysteries 
of passion shows more reverence than profuse 
and detailed exhibitions. It shows more rever- 
ence, more understanding, and more dignity. 

Our American literature is sadly in need of 
improvement, but we shall not improve by imi- 
tating the only thing in Continental literature 
which takes no talent to copy. Changing the 
trumps will not help us nearly so much as more 
skill in playing the game. 



CHAPTER VI 

KOMANTIC REVIVAL 1894-1904 

The romantic revival from 1894 to 1904 — Zola and Steven- 
son — two predictions of approaching romance — the remark- 
able year 1894 — Weyman, Doyle, Hope, Churchill, Stockton 
— Sienkiewicz — passing away of romantic extravagance — 
survivals of the school, such as McCutcheon and Farnol — 
the "life" novel of to-day — DeMorgan, Bennett, Wells, 
White, Holland — the gain to the novel — the loss. 

When George Eliot died in 1880, it appeared as 
though English fiction would not soon burst 
the fetters of Eealism. Dickens, Thackeray, 
George Eliot, Trollope, and Eeade, despite an 
occasional holiday in the climate of romance, 
were all professional realists; Thomas Hardy 
was attracting a steadily widening circle of 
readers; in America, Howells and James were 
busily a-hunting specimens with the camera; 
Turgenev and Tolstoi were stimulating the 
British novel in French-translation-dilutions; 
and in France, this very year saw the publica- 
tion of Zola's treatise on the Experimental 
Novel. 

133 



134 THE ADVANCE OF 

Eomance seemed anachronistic. Zola, flushed 
with the new scientific spirit, wholly confident 
that he belonged to the future and the future to 
him, announced that Walter Scott was a novel- 
ist exclusively for boarding-school girls! that 
he would never again be read by serious and 
mature readers. 

Zola was merely announcing what seemed to 
the majority of his listeners, irrefragably true. 
Two factors, however, were overlooked in his 
prophecy, — which may be called the negative 
and the positive element. Eealism and roman- 
ticism seem bound to alternate ; and the realists 
were so overconfident, so sure of themselves, 
that they plunged into excesses inevitably cer- 
tain to lead to reform, or at any rate to some- 
thing different. It is a great pity that Zola 
could not have lived to describe his own death ; 
for the manner of his death would not only have 
interested him, it would have made a splendid 
chapter in any one of his experimental novels. 
It will be remembered that he died of suffoca- 
tion in his sleep ; he was found, in the morning, 
lying half out of bed, his face on the floor 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 135 

buried in his own vomit. The death of this 
great leader is an excellent illustration of the 
limits of his art. 

The other factor — the positive factor — ^is not 
so easy to predict as the negative ; but its pos- 
sibility is always delightful to contemplate, for 
it makes the history of art to resemble a won- 
derful game of chance. When the citizens of 
the French Revolution thought they had estab- 
lished republican equality, Napoleon Bonaparte 
happened to appear on the scene ; and when the 
giant Realism had got the spirit of English fic- 
tion safely locked into the dungeon, the young 
knightly figure of Stevenson arrived and re- 
leased her. 

Stevenson was thirty years old when George 
Eliot died. He looked about him on a dreary 
landscape. At its best, realism was made up 
of afternoon teas ; at its worst, it was garbage. 
He wanted something that should at once be 
more stimulating and more agreeable. Not 
being able to discover it anywhere, he was 
forced to produce it himself. ^ ' For Zola, ' ' said 
he in a letter, ' ' I have no toleration, though the 



136 THE ADVANCE OF 

curious, eminently bourgeois, and eminently 
French creature has power of a kind. But I 
would lie Avere deleted. I would not give a 
chapter of old Dumas . . . for the whole boil- 
ing of the Zolas. ' ' 

Stevenson said the following titles ^* should 
be''; The Filibuster's Cache: Jerry Ahershaw: 
Blood Money: a Tale, instead of ^'what is,'' 
Aunt Anne's Tea Cosy, Mrs, Brierly's Niece, 
Society: a Novel. It was about the year 1884 
that he wrote this. 

However, in 1881 he was sure of his mission. 
Although Treasure Island was not published 
until 1883, we find that he had begun work upon 
it so early as the 25th August, 1881, for on that 
day he wrote to Henley : 

I am now on another lay for the moment . . . see 
here, The Sea-Cook, or Treasure Island; a Story for 
Boys. If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have 
gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to 
learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the 
Admiral Benhow public-house on Devon coast, that 
it's all about a map, and a treasure, and a mutiny, 
and a derelict ship, and a current, . . . and a doctor, 
and another doctor, and a sea-cook with one leg, and 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 137 

a sea-song with the chorus *'Yo-ho-ho and a bottle 
of rum" (at the third Ho you heave at the capstan 
bars), which is a real buccaneer's song, only known 
to the crew of the late Captain Flint. . . . That's the 
kind of man I am, blast your eyes. . . . And now 
look here — this is next day — and three chapters are 
written. ... It's quite silly and horrid fun, and 
what I want is the best book about the Buccaneers 
that can be had ... a chapter a day I mean to do ; 
they are short; and perhaps in a month The Sea- 
CooJc may to Routledge go, yo-ho-ho and a bottle 
of rum ! ... No women in the story, Lloyd 's orders ; 
and who so blithe to obey? It's awful fun, boys' sto- 
ries ; you just indulge the pleasure of your heart, that's 
all; no trouble, no strain. ... sweet, generous, 
human toils ! You would like my blind beggar in 
Chapter III, I believe; no writing, just drive along 
as the words come and the pen will scratch ! 

Seldom is a preacher able to practise so well. 
An ardent advocate of the gospel of romance, 
Stevenson, in less than a dozen years, produced 
Treasure Island, Prince Otto, Kidnapped, The 
Black Arrow, The Master of Ballantrae, Catri- 
ona (David Balfour), The Ehb Tide. 

These books worked a revolution in English 
fiction. One man, appearing at just the mo- 
ment when readers were either weary or dis- 



138 THE ADVANCE OF 

gusted with the reigning Sovereign, Eealism, 
toppled him over with the sheer audacity of 
genius. Many who read these lines can remem- 
ber the mad eagerness with which we greeted 
those new romances. What a relief to turn 
from the close, foul mugginess of naturalism to 
the invigorating air of the ocean ! For Steven- 
son 's immense service to letters was really 
nothing more nor less than opening the windows 
of heaven, and sweeping the chambers of art 
with air and sunshine. Before he died, he had 
converted the English speaking world, and he 
knew it. 

It seems to me pedantic to prefer Scott to 
Stevenson. The latter beat the former at his 
own game. Stevenson's romances are more 
thrillingly adventurous than Scott's; his char- 
acters are equally interesting; his style is im- 
measurably superior. When I first read The 
Beach of Falesd, I had to stop and compose 
myself, so loud was the beating of my heart. 
His men and women will be my intimates for 
the rest of my life. And the great goddess of 
Komance, hitherto rigged out in any old clothes, 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 139 

was adorned by Stevenson with graceful, ex- 
quisite, and shining garments. It is safe to 
say that with the one exception of Eenry Es- 
mond, there has never been in the literature of | 
prose romance so happy a blending of wildly \ 
exciting incident with such technically rhetori-i 
cal perfection. ^ 

Of all modern authors, Stevenson is the best 
for youth. Our boys and girls follow the arch- 
magician from wonder to wonder, and they 
learn the delight of reading, and they absorb 
the beauty of style, as one learns good manners 
by associating with well-bred exemplars. For 
Henry James, describing a lady serving tea on 
an English lawn, is not more careful of his 
language than Stevenson, describing one-legged 
Silver in the act of murder. Stevenson was 
purely literary; he was not a great dramatist 
nor a great poet, though he wrote verses and 
plays; but it is abundantly clear that he was a 
great novelist, essayist, and maker of epistles. 
In these three departments he stands in the first 
rank. 

Two years before his death the signs of the 



140 THE ADVANCE OF 

coming revival of romance were unmistakable, 
and it is interesting to remember that two Eng- 
lish critics went on record at almost the same 
moment. Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Gosse each 
independently predicted the coming flood, 
warning all novelists to get into the ark of 
safety. In an essay called The Present State 
of the English Novel (1892), part of which had 
been printed in 1888, Professor Saintsbury haz- 
arded the following definite but somewhat cau- 
tious prophecy: 

In discussing the state of the English novel at a 
time which seems likely to be a rather exceptionally 
interesting one in the history of a great department 
of literature in England, it will probably be as well 
to make the treatment as little of a personal one as 
possible . . . the question ... is one of setting in 
order, as well as may be, the chief characteristics of 
the English novels of the day, and of indicating, with 
as little rashness as possible, which of them are on 
the mounting hand and which are on the sinking. 
And for my part, and in the first place, I do not see 
any reason to think the reappearance of the romance 
of adventure at all likely to be a mere passing phe- 
nomenon. For the other kind has gone hopelessly 
sterile in all countries, and is very unlikely to be good 
for anything unless it is raised anew from seed, and 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 141 

allowed a pretty long course of time. . . . All things 
are possible in a time when a novelist of real talent 
like M. Zola dismisses Sir Walter Scott as a *' board- 
ing-school novelist," and when a critic of real in- 
telligence like my friend, Mr. Brander Matthews, takes 
Mr. Howells for an excellent critic. The safer plan 
is to stand still and see the wonderful works of the 
Lord. 

In an essay called The Limits of Realism in 
Fiction (1893), Mr. Edmund Gosse remarked: 

In the meantime, wherever I look I see the novel 
ripe for another reaction. The old leaders will not 
change. It is not to be expected that they will write 
otherwise than in the mode which has grown mature 
with them. But in France, among the younger men, 
every one is escaping from the realistic formula. The 
two young athletes for whom M. Zola predicted ten 
years ago an "experimental" career more profoundly 
scientific than his own, are realists no longer. M. 
Guy de Maupassant has become a psychologist, and 
M. Huysmans a mystic. M. Bourget, who set all the 
ladies dancing after his ingenious, musky books, never 
has been a realist ; nor has Pierre Loti, in whom, with 
a fascinating freshness, the old exiled romanticism 
comes back with a laugh and a song. All points to a 
reaction in France; and in Russia, too, if what we 
hear is true, the next step will be toward the mystical 
and the introspective. In America it would be rash 



142 THE ADVANCE OF 

for a foreigner to say what signs of change are evi- 
dent. The time has hardly come when we look to 
America for the symptoms of literary initiative. But 
it is my conviction that the limits of realism have 
been reached; that no great writer who has not al- 
ready adopted the experimental system will do so ; and 
that we ought now to be on the outlook to welcome 
(and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists 
with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must 
unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct 
for mystery and beauty. 

This scripture was fulfilled in our ears. 
The year of Stevenson's death, 1894, was a 
notable year in the history of English fiction, 
both for the number and varied excellence of the 
novels it produced; and because it was the be- 
ginning of a tidal wave of romanticism. Old 
faiths always flash brightest just before their 
extinction, thinks Thomas Hardy; and in the 
year 1894, were published Trilby, Marcella, 
Lifers Little Ironies, Esther Waters, Lord Or- 
mont and His Aminta, Pembroke, which have 
nothing to do with any romantic reaction; but 
there also appeared The Ebb Tide, The Jungle 
Book, Perly cross. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead 
Wilson, Under the Red Robe, My Lady Rotha, 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 143 

and a story of prodigious influence, The Pris- 
oner of Zenda. 

The demand for some of these books was so 
sharp and the rapidity of their circulation so 
remarkable, that the sales became a matter of 
interest to critics who were watching the public 
taste. It was about this time that the New 
York Bookman began to publish its monthly 
list of ** best sellers,'^ which not merely recorded 
the lines of popularity, but gave a stimulus to 
their extension. 

Komanticism suddenly became so fashionable 
that many young men and women wrote their 
first attempts in fiction in this manner; and 
some novelists of established reputation, unwill- 
ing to be left adrift, trimmed their sails to the 
fresh breeze. The old masters. Hardy, Mere- 
dith, Howells, James, refused to surrender ; but 
Hardy speedily stopped writing novels; so did 
Meredith; and in America there was so strong 
a reaction against Howells and James that for 
some years their readers greatly diminished in 
numbers, and their production in excellence. 
Mr. Howells, though he kept right on, wrote 



144 THE ADVANCE OF 

nothing of higli value from 1892 to 1902 ; Mr. 
James produced little from 1890 to 1896 — and 
in 1898, perhaps unconsciously under the influ- 
ence of romance, he wrote one of the best ghost 
stories in the world. The Turn of the Screw, 
which is the wildest romanticism in a realistic 
setting. Mr. Howells protested in vain against 
this sudden domination of romance, calling the 
whole thing *^ romantic rot"; but while defiantly- 
sceptical, he was nevertheless temporarily en- 
gulfed. 

The strength of the Eomantic Eevival is 
shown most clearly in the fact that it drew men 
whose natural tastes, inclinations, and tempera- 
ments were realistic, and forced them to pro- 
duce romances. Stanley Weyman, whose mod- 
est preface to the new edition of his works is 
confessionally charming, admits that he has 
tried merely to give entertainment to the pub- 
lic; and that if he has brightened lonely hours, 
he is satisfied. Now Mr. "Weyman, by nature, 
is a realist, and he began his career with a novel 
that might have been written by Anthony Trol- 
lope. It is called The New Rector , and it is an 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 145 

excellent bit of pure realism. It made not the 
slightest impression ; suddenly shifting, he pro- 
duced in rapid succession, The House of the 
Wolf, A Gentleman of France, Under the Red 
Robe, and found himself one of the most famous 
men in the world. For about fifteen years he 
kept up a copious contribution, and when the 
romantic wave subsided, he retired. 

My own experience on a certain Sunday even- 
ing in 1894 illustrates in microcosmic manner 
the world's change of heart from realism to 
romanticism. I had just finished reading Mar- 
cella, and I felt as if my mouth were full of 
ashes. Then I picked up Under the Red Rohe, 
and I read it from first page to last not only 
without rising from my chair, but without a 
wiggle in it. Such a glorious relief from tire- 
some party politics and pharisaical reformers 
in London, to 

''Marked Cards!'' 

the lie hotly given and returned, the tables and 
chairs overset, the rush for the dark street, the 
clash of swords, the parry and thrust — we're 
off! 



146 THE ADVANCE OF 

The physician, Conan Doyle, with his finger 
on the public pulse, had already got started in 
the late eighties with Micah Clarke and The 
White Company; but these books were not 
nearly so much read in the eighties as in the 
nineties, when they were more in the fashion. 
Anthony Hope, who had been graduated from 
Balliol with scholarly honours of the first class, 
and whose real tastes and talents in literature 
are seen in the Dolly Dialogues and Quisante, 
produced the romantic extravaganza, The Pris- 
oner of Zenda, with his tongue in his cheek. 
This should have been turned into a comic 
opera, but so hot was the public for romantic 
excitement, that together with Under the Red 
Robe, it had an enormous run on the boards as 
sheer melodrama. I am glad that Mr. Hawkins 
wrote The Prisoner of Zenda, because it gave 
to so many people a pleasurable and innocent 
excitement ; but I do not believe he would have 
written it either fifteen years before or fifteen 
years after. ... It was a great mistake to kill 
the gentleman in Rupert of Hentzau; books 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 147 

that are written for entertainment should not 
suddenly become black. 

The romantic germ crossed the ocean, and 
America was infected. Historical romances 
became amazingly popular ; so long as they were 
** costume novels," whose characters talked a 
jargon of obsolete oaths, and had a sentimental 
love story, with a historical royal personage 
as deus ex macJiina, it mattered not if their his- 
torical foundation betrayed ignorance, nor if 
their style were crude. Scores of such books 
might be mentioned, which sold like wildfire 
until the next sensation came along; but a 
peculiarly excellent example of the whole class 
appeared in When Knighthood Was in Flower, 
by the late Charles Major. This work was 
painfully lacking in distinction, yet over ^ve 
hundred thousand copies were sold. If Steven- 
son spoke contemptuously of his own poorest 
bit of tushery, The Black Arrow, what would he 
have said to this? It is fortunate that a 
teacher cannot always be judged by the work of 
his disciples. 



148 THE ADVANCE OF 

Mr. Winston Churchill, now one of the most 
popular realistic novelists in America, who 
seems more interested in political, religious and 
social reform than in the art of the novel, and 
whose books sell by the hundred thousand, hap- 
pened to begin his career in the flood-tide of 
the romantic revival; and being an infallible 
interpreter of public taste, naturally wrote an 
exciting historical romance, Richard Carvel, 
with a frontispiece of a duel in appropriate cos- 
tume; this story, reminiscent in places of The 
Virginians, enjoyed a tremendous vogue. Now 
if one wishes to know how the temper of the 
reading public has changed from 1899 to 
1915, one has merely to compare Richard 
Carvel with The Inside of the Cup or A Far 
Country, 

The late Paul Leicester Ford, realist by in- 
stinct and training, whose Honorable Peter 
Stirling has not yet been forgotten (although 
the hero has been identified both with Grover 
Cleveland and David B. Hill), wrote a stirring 
historical romance, Janice Meredith, which con- 
quered the public immediately, and like so many 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 149 

of its kind was speedily transferred to the stage 
and thence to oblivion. 

Miss Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, 
coming at the end of the century, when the ro- 
mantic movement reached its climax, had, but 
did not hold, a tremendous popularity. Being 
absolutely up to date, it rather quickly passed 
out of style. Booth Tarkington, a writer of 
great skill and talent, who had made a contem- 
porary study of manners in The Gentleman 
from Indiana, contributed a charming jeu 
d' esprit to the romantic school in Monsieur 
Beaucaire; compared with Dumas 's Three 
Guardsmen, this is a humming-bird to an eagle ; 
yet its brightness has not faded with the passing 
summer of romance. This comparison, by the 
way, reminds me that just at the height of this 
fashion a new version of Dumas 's immortal 
story was put on the American stage by. Mr. 
SotherUj and flourished mightily. 

Perhaps the centripetal force of the romantic 
movement is shown most clearly in America by 
the sudden catching up of our late beloved 
Frank Stockton. Humour acts on romance like 



150 THE ADVANCE OF 

prussic acid; and Frank Stockton was a pro- 
fessional humourist, whose most characteristic 
work — ^may it never die ! — is The Casting Away 
of Mrs, Lechs and Mrs, Aleshine, Mr. Stock- 
ton had puzzled the world by his strange tale 
of The Lady or the Tiger; but he puzzled the 
critics much more when he wrote The Adven- 
tures of Captain Horn, a slam-bang yarn of 
blood and gold. Many of the critics thought 
he meant it as a budesque. Mr. Howells, 
alarmed by this apparent defection of a notable 
novelist, insisted that the whole thing was a 
joke. But it was quite the contrary; it was a 
case of a trained literary expert following the 
market, seeming to say, ^*If you really want 
tales of adventure, why not have good onesT' 
And Captain Horn, which I have read four 
times, is one of the most ingenious and most 
thrilling of its kind. It had an enormous suc- 
cess, and unfortunately led its author into the 
composition of a sequel, which resembled most 
sequels. This Captain Horn is not only unlike 
Mr. Stockton's previous work, it represents a 
mental attitude flatly contrary. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 151 

The Eomantic Eevival lasted about fifteen 
years after Stevenson's death; and then, like 
most revivals, men returned to life, as after 
the rocket, we see the stars. There are certain 
American novelists, who, having started under 
the influence of The Prisoner of Zenda, do not 
quite see that this particular cock won't fight 
any more ; such is the genial author of Beverly 
of Graustarh; one of his novels had the follow- 
ing aperitif in the publisher's statement: ^*This 
book goes with a rush, and ends with a smash, ' ' 
— thus resembling neither life nor art. He is 
far better in sheer humorous extravaganza, 
like Brewster's Millions, A glaring English 
anachronism appears in the work of Jeffery 
Farnol. 

More than thirty years have elapsed since 
the appearance of Treasure Island; yet, apart 
from the work of its author, I can think of not 
one historical romance among the hundreds 
that pullulated that seems likely to survive, ex- 
cept the splendid leviathans of Sienkiewicz. 
While Stevenson was writing his stories, the 
same mysterious spirit of romance hovered over 



152 THE ADVANCE OF 

Poland, and in the eighties Henryk Sienkiewicz 
produced his great trilogy With Fire and Sword, 
The Deluge, and Pan Michael. These, trans- 
lated by an admirable literary artist, the late 
Mr. Curtin, appeared in America in the early 
nineties, just at the psychological moment. 
Then in the year 1896 there was published the 
romance of Eome, Quo Vadis, the American 
translation coming from the press in Boston 
three months before the original in Warsaw. 
That particular year was a first-rate year for 
this kind of thing, and the world of historical 
romances had a bumper crop. This Quo Vadis, 
though decidedly inferior to the Polish trilogy, 
drew such wide and violent acclaim that it might 
just as well have been unanimous; and The 
Last Days of Pompeii has never seemed the 
same since. After this, Sienwiekicz 's romances 
regularly appeared in English before Polish, in 
response to the keen demand. But is it a sign 
of the times 1 In 1900, at the climax of the ro- 
mantic revival. The Knights of the Cross had a 
big sale, and it is indeed a noble work; but in 
1906, when the movement was waning, On the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 153 

Field of Glory attracted little attention, and Ms 
subsequent works almost none at all ; how many- 
readers know of Whirlpools (1910) and In 
Desert and Wilderness (1912)? Yet these are 
assuredly worth reading. 

Apart from the works of Stevenson and Sien- 
kiewicz the romantic flood left no definite thing 
of value when it receded; but just as you can 
tell where a vanished stream has been by the 
bright freshness of the grass, so the influence 
of the romantic revival, in spite of its extremes 
of fashion, was healthful and refreshing. The 
novel went from realism to naturalism to ex- 
perimentalism, and that way madness lies ; then 
came a change in the weather, and the sultriness 
departed. 

The old realism has not returned; but since 
the year 1906 a fine new spirit has entered into 
contemporary fiction, the spirit of Eeality. 
The last ten years have been marked by a con- 
siderable number of long biographical novels, 
which I call for want of a better name, the 
**life'' novel. Without the trappings and con- 
ventions of ^ * realism, ' ^ we find in this life school 



154 THE ADVANCE OF 

work that is thoroughly sincere. The basal in- 
terest in human nature is so great that even its 
weaknesses and trivialities have been always 
thought worthy of the serious attention of ar- 
tists of dignity; and when faithfully reported, 
with sympathy, as by Thackeray, or with scorn, 
as by Flaubert, — ^immediately arouse in intelli- 
gent readers that delight of recognition which 
must ever be the target of the painter of por- 
traits, whatever his implements may be. As 
Mr. Howells says, ^*Ah, poor Eeal Life, which 
I love, can I make others see the delight I find 
in thy foolish and insipid face?" He can; he 
has. 

The new life school assume that every detail 
in their huge books will be interesting, so long 
as it can be verified by the experience of the 
reader. This is the secret of the wonderful 
charm of William De Morgan, who perhaps 
more than any other novelist, is responsible for 
the vogue of the lengthy biographical fictions of 
to-day. He had lived over sixty years without 
writing a page of creative work ; he had scarcely 
read any novels except those of Dickens ; was in 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 155 

no sense of the word a literary man. If he had 
not had an attack of influenza, he might not 
have thought of writing; it was in the idleness 
of convalescence that he began, and was domes- 
tically persuaded to finish Joseph Vance. Even 
then he came near cancelling the first chapter; 
it seemed too much like Dickens. His novel 
contained 280,000 words, and as Mr. De Morgan 
writes an enormous hand, the bulk of his manu- 
script was appalling. He sent it to a publisher, 
and immediately received it back, by freight, I 
suppose. Thinking it might possibly be ex- 
amined if in smaller proportions, he had it 
^* typed.'' One morning, as the chief entered 
the room, he found the girl who was typing 
Joseph Vance shaken with sobs ; the story was 
too much for her feelings. This made sufficient 
data for Mr. William Heinemann, the most en- 
terprising publisher in London ; in the summer 
of 1906 appeared Joseph Vance, which pur- 
ported to be *'an ill-written autobiography," 
and it took England and America by storm. It 
narrates in the first person the biography of 
Joseph Vance from babyhood to old age; its 



156 THE ADVANCE OF 

descriptions are a mirror, its conversations an 
echo, of reality. 

One of the most popular of British novelists 
at this moment is Arnold Bennett. The manner 
in which he won popularity is even more flat- 
tering to the public than to him. He had taken 
a rather cavalier air as a journalist, and could 
^^see no harm^' in writing stuff that he knew 
was trash, so long as one earned a living by it. 
He had the serious soul of the artist, and the 
mocking ironical spirit of the self-conscious 
literary trickster; some books, he frankly con- 
fessed, he wrote as pot-boilers, while in others 
he enjoyed the luxury of writing to please him- 
self, that is, to please his conscience. Well, 
what happened? He had published Anna of 
the Five Towns, The Grand Babylon Hotel, The 
Gates of Wrath, Leonora, A Great Man, Sacred 
and Profane Love, Whom God Hath Joined, — 
all superficially clever works of no value, writ- 
ten to make money. But they did not make 
money. They did not make anything. No one 
in America apparently had ever heard of him 
until he published (just to please himself) the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 157 

sincere and tragic history of the lives of two 
sisters, The Old Wives' Tale (1908). The sin- 
cerity and fidelity of its art were instantly rec- 
ognised; and Mr. Bennett found himself a 
famous man, with an immense public eager to 
read anything from his pen. What happened! 
This solid work not only gave him reputation 
and money, it supported all his previous liter- 
ary frivolities. What does it mean in his bibli- 
ography when we see after all those light ham- 
mock-and-steamer books that I have mentioned, 
the legend ' ' New Edition, ' ' with a date invari- 
ably subsequent to 1908? What does it mean 
when we find that some of them were not pub- 
lished at all in America until after 1908! 

Not only was his most serious essay in art 
the book that brought the harvest he had in vain 
tried to reap, his subsequent works in lighter 
vein were done with far greater skill. There is 
simply no comparison in charm and cleverness 
between The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902: new 
edition, 1914: first printed in America, 1913), 
and The Card (1911), published the same year 
in America under the title Denry the Audacious, 



158 THE ADVANCE OF 

Under any title it is one of the most delightful 
flashes of humour in our time; but what a de- 
testable habit English writers have of changing 
the name of a book when it appears in the 
United States! 

Like most successful English novelists of the 
twentieth century, Mr. Bennett is a successful 
playwright. His dramaturgic adventures must 
have interfered with the completion of the 
trilogy begun in 1910 with Clayhanger, and 
continued in 1911 with Hilda Lessways, as may 
be seen by remembering that Milestones ap- 
peared in 1912. Thousands of serious readers 
awaited with considerable eagerness the third 
book in this chronicle of commonplace and self- 
ish lives, made to appear even more common- 
place than any individual life really is. (This 
effect is attained simply by forgetting the spir- 
itual values present in every person in the 
world.) The above-said serious readers waited 
until 1915, and I fear they are not certain 
that These Twain was worth the wait. It is 
marked by genuine artistic sincerity, its best 
quality ; but perhaps success and vivid popular- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 159 

ity have dulled the edge of Mr. Bennett's pen, as 
they certainly have for the moment clipped his 
wings. This latest history of people who eat 
and drink and sleep lacks the splendid zeal burn- 
ing all through The Old Wives' Tale. It is a 
verification of Henry James's comment that in 
the work of Arnold Bennett we admire the pa- 
tient and steady industry of the man, laying 
brick on brick, but it is impossible to guess for 
what object the structure is raised. 

Has Mr. Bennett in this latest work really 
done his absolute best! His best is good, very 
good indeed ; but he is not a bit too good for his 
public. 

Mr. Wells, who is one of those infrequently 
born persons — a professional reformer and a 
professional humourist — has made one impor- 
tant contribution to the life novel, in Tono- 
Bungay, (1909), which may eventually rank as 
his most important work. 

In America, one of the best examples of this 
school is seen in A Certain Rich Man, by 
William Allen White, of Kansas. The style of 
this story is somewhat careless ; but it is a thor- 



160 THE ADVANCE OF 

onghly sound book, pregnant with reality; one 
of the finest American novels of the twentieth 
century. It has little grace, and no lightness of 
touch; but it is a faithful picture of the life of 
an American, and is redeemed from clumsiness 
by the strength of sincerity. 

Just as Naturalism was supplanted by Eo- 
manticism, so the absurd excesses of Eomanti- 
cism were suicidal. It seems astonishing to re- 
member that in 1894-1899 the typical novels 
were The Prisoner of Zenda, When Knighthood 
Was in Flower , and Richard Carvel, and that 
from 1906-1909 the public were devouring 
Joseph Vance, The Old Wives' Tale, Tono- 
Bungay, and A Certain Rich Man. 

The new movement bore fruit, not to say a 
whole orchard, in one novel in France, Jean 
Christophe, by Eomain Eolland. This is the 
detailed biography of one man, beginning with 
his birth-cry, and ending with the death-rattle. 
It was published in ten volumes, and has de- 
servedly attracted more serious attention than 
any other French novel of this century. It has 
been translated into most European languages, 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 161 

and miglit well have been called The Life and 
Times of Jean Christ ophe ; for it is a wonderful 
picture of the intellectual life in Europe before 
the Great War, and ought to be of permanent 
value. Its author has the French clearness of 
vision, with a New England conscience. 

The one great defect in the life novel, seen of 
course most clearly in the immense number of 
feeble imitations of the books I have mentioned, 
is the temptation to formlessness. Many of 
them have no plot, and no sense of construction ; 
they begin with birth, and might go on in- 
definitely; the author adding incidents until he 
has had enough, and then deciding to quit. 
He is either too lazy or too incompetent to 
provide an artistic structure. It is all well 
enough to write a biographical novel, but it 
ought to be a novel, not a biography nor a diary. 
The great horde of novel-writers follow the 
market so sharply that I am already becoming 
somewhat weary of stories, where, if you open 
the first chapter, you are in the nursery; the 
middle chapter, you are just leaving college; 
the last chapter, you hear bells — sometimes wed- 



162 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ding, sometimes funeral. This kind of thing 
is getting to be altogether too common ; I could 
name many, but I remember three rather pop- 
ular novels, which appeared almost at the same 
moment in 1915, that illustrate, along with some 
excellent qualities, the chief defects and the 
wearisome repetition of this rather shiftless 
method. 



CHAPTER VII 

MEREDITH AND HARDY 

George Meredith — his long career — his German education 
— false starts — spirit and body — his hatred of asceticism — 
his original force — his bad style — ^bom in the wrong age 
— naturally adapted to poetic drama — his combination of 
paganism and optimism — his belief in the individual — the 
vagueness of his teaching — his hatred of discipline — his 
chivalry — Rhoda Fleming — normality of Meredith's char- 
acters — Clara Middleton — Meredith's impatient dislike of 
Tennyson — his criticism of himself in Beaucliamp's Career 
— a fantastic genius — fluctuations of his reputation — his 
superb tribute to America — a footnote on Thomas Hardy. 

A GIGANTIC and unique figure in modern fiction 
demands separate and serious attention. 
George Meredith died on the eighteenth of May, 
1909, and *Hhe air seems bright with his past 
presence yet. ' ' Although in his ideas and men- 
tal attitudes he was emphatically a man of the 
twentieth century, it is interesting and pleas- 
ant to remember that he published fiction be- 
fore the earliest work of George Eliot appeared. 
None of his books ever had a large sale; but 

163 



164 THE ADVANCE OF 

during the last twenty-five years of his life his 
name commanded immense respect, his home 
was a Mecca for literary men, and his death 
seemed like the falling of a pillar of literature. 
No modern writer has come before the public 
with higher *^ recommendations"; the much- 
abused word ^^ master'' is here fitly applied ; and 
the verse tribute of Thomas Hardy and the 
prose poem of J. M. Barrie were beautiful 
flowers on his grave. 

His birthday was the day of Darwin and Lin- 
coln; his birth-year the year of Tolstoi and 
Ibsen; and even if his work cannot rank in im- 
portance with the work of these four, his per- 
sonality shines with real splendour. 

Although Meredith was born in Hampshire, 
England, and spent most of his life in the south- 
ern part of the island, his education and his 
temperament were decidedly un-English. He 
went neither to Oxford nor to Cambridge, but 
to Germany ; did he unconsciously acquire there 
his cumbersome, involved and unmanageable 
style 1 For the only English author with whom 
his prose style has anything in common is 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 165 

Thomas Carlyle, who was also inspired by Ger- 
many ; and we know that Meredith had a tower- 
ing admiration for Carlyle. Of course he did 
not really write like him; he wrote like no one. 
But the manner of his thinking, however un- 
palatable this may be just now, was German. 
He was more interested in the metaphysics of 
passion than in passion ; and his novels are fully 
as much the product of speculative thought as 
of accurate observation. He spun all his books 
out of himself, as a spider spins his delicate and 
intricate web; this too is quite German; it is 
exactly the way Kant built the fabric of the 
Kritik of Pure Reason, 

Whatever may be Meredith's place in the 
history of the novel, none can deny to him the 
title of original and powerful thinker. 

Meredith's first essays at the profession of 
law and the business of marriage were alike un- 
happy and unsuccessful; he was by nature an 
absolutely free spirit. . . . His soul's dark cot- 
tage let in new light as he approached the 
grave; no one who saw him in his later years 
went away unimpressed. His noble and beauti- 



166 THE ADVANCE OF 

ful head, adorned with hair and beard of snow, 
made a presence of inexpressible dignity. 

His chief recreation, apart from the foolish 
one of throwing and catching again a heavy 
hammer, which probably weakened his spine, 
was reading French literature. It is rather 
strange that he learned nothing from French 
style — the clear, precise, short sentences in that 
language ought to have affected him, and did 
not. But his attitude toward the French was 
wonderfully sympathetic; wonderfully so, be- 
cause until the days of the Entente most Eng- 
lishmen have signally failed to understand the 
French point of view. Look at the narrowness 
of Tennyson! But there was nothing insular 
about Meredith. 

Like so many novelists, Meredith began his 
career as a poet, his first volume of poems ap- 
pearing in 1851. He would rather have spent 
his life writing poetry than prose; but he had 
no money. Fiction was his kitchen wench, he 
always used to say; poetry was his Muse. His 
poems have received hysterical and rhapsodical 
praise, but he is not really amOng the English 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 167 

poets, and even if lie were, it is none of our 
business here. 

As Browning has observed, the bird wings 
and sings at the same time ; spirit and body help 
each other ; and just as a life of sensuality will 
surely deaden the spirit, so a life of asceticism 
in many cases has an effect somewhat similar. 
Meredith's genius was profoundly spiritual, but 
he believed the spirit expressed itself through 
the body. In a letter written in 1888, he said, 
**I have written always with the perception that 
there is no life but of the spirit; that 
the concrete is really the shadowy ; yet that the 
way to spiritual life lies in the complete unfold- 
ing of the creature, not in the nipping of his 
passions. An outrage to Nature helps to ex- 
tinguish his light. To the flourishing of the 
spirit, then, through the healthy exercise of the 
senses.'' 

The intense and acrimonious difference of 
opinion about the value of Meredith's novels is 
an indication of the force of his personality, and 
of his unconventionality of expression. Brown- 
ing, Wagner, Ibsen, aroused a tempest which 



168 THE ADVANCE OF 

has left a clear sky of fame; clouds and dark- 
ness are still around Walt Whitman. Meredith 
and Whitman are authors that it is best to treat 
pragmatically, if we wish their work to bear 
fruit in our souls ; if you think they are respec- 
tively the greatest novelist and the greatest 
poet of modern times, why, then they are, to 
you. 

To me George Meredith is neither God nor 
Devil. He is not my Teacher, as Browning is ; 
not my Artist, as Hardy is ; not my Refuge, as 
Stevenson is. But he was a genial giant, and 
I have for his manhood and his genius profound 
reverence. I know of no better illustration of 
the phrase Arnold applied to Emerson. George 
Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a 
great man who wrote novels. He was one of the 
greatest men of our time. 

No criticism of him has pleased me more than 
that by the late Henry James. **The lyrical 
element is not great, is in fact not present at all 
in Balzac, in Scott . . . nor in Thackeray, nor 
in Dickens — which is precisely why they are 
so essentially novelists, so almost exclusively 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 169 

lovers of the image of life. ... It is considera- 
ble in that bright particular genius of our own 
day, George Meredith, who so strikes us as 
hitching winged horses to the chariot of his 
prose — steeds who prance and dance and cara- 
cole, who strain the tracQS, attempt to quit the 
ground, and yearn for the upper air.'' 

Meredith wrote with the utmost difficulty; he 
toiled, slaved, sweated over his manuscript ; his 
style is not in the least spontaneous, but rather 
the result of elaborate ingenuity, with more 
than a dash of downright perversity. It is 
contagious, too, as is shown in some of the esti- 
mates written of him by his admirers. His 
style is not only bad for a novel, it is bad any- 
way, it contains passages that perplex and tor- 
ture, rather than interest or inspire. Take this 
sentence from Lord Ormont and Bis Aminta: 

Was she not colour the sight of men? 

Meredith was a Master-Mind, but not a Master 
of English Prose ; a master is like a fine man on 
a fine horse, you admire both the controller and 
the controlled. 



170 THE ADVANCE OF 

Mereditli's true vein might have been poetic 
drama. He was born at the wrong time. If 
he had only been an Elizabethan, or had be- 
longed to the latter half of the twentieth cen- 
tury! He had great dramatic qualities, won- 
derful idyllic powers, was full of blood, and al- 
ways a poet at heart. His splendid intellectual 
endowments would have made him a worthy 
contemporary of Marlowe and Chapman, and in 
that open-air age he would probably have writ- 
ten masterpieces for the stage. He is not quite 
a great lyric poet, nor a great novelist; poetic 
drama would have allowed his genius to become 
more articulate. It is highly significant of the 
domination of the Novel that this man should 
have elected to write in that form ; also a great 
compliment to the Novel. 

George Meredith was not so complete a Pagan 
as Thomas Hardy, but he was essentially Pa- 
gan ; his real emphasis is on this life and on this 
present world; he speaks vaguely of God, but 
the Divine Power has no important role in his 
books, either as an immanent force or as our 
Father in Heaven. His men and women get 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 171 

along somehow without religion, and fight their 
own battles without looking up. Yet Hardy is 
an avowed pessimist, and Meredith ^s novels al- 
ways give the impression of optimism. With 
no premises but the external world and its his- 
tory to w^ork from, Hardy reaches pessimism 
and Meredith optimism. This latter conclusion 
is perhaps owing to two factors. 

First, Meredith was hearty, robust, genial, 
buoyant ; his men and women 'delight in violent 
exercise, eat copious meals, and rejoice in old 
wine ; they find the world jovial, and add to its 
joviality. Hardy, on the other hand, while ten- 
derly sympathetic, and delicately responsive, 
has little geniality. He watches people feast- 
ing, but cannot feast himself; he is sorry for 
them, feeling sure that tears will follow laugh- 
ter. If he ultimately reaches heaven, as through 
his sincerity and tenderness he ought to, his 
occupation will be gone, for there both sympa- 
thy and lamentation should be superfluous. 

Second, Meredith believed (at least artisti- 
cally) that men and women are not passive in- 
struments of Fate; he thought that men and 



172 THE ADVANCE OF 

women can conquer heredity, environment, yes, 
fate itself; his stout-hearted heroes and hero- 
ines are at all times masters of their own des- 
tiny. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our 
stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. 
In Hardy's eyes, we are mere bits of the vast 
machine; we have no more influence than the 
spoke of a fly-wheel; we do not have to wait 
until we are dead before we are rolled round 
with rocks, and stones, and trees. 

Thomas Hardy's superiority as a novelist 
over Meredith consists mainly in three things : 
the perfection of constructive power (no novel- 
ist was ever a better architect), the beautiful 
stately march of his style (first chapter of Re- 
turn of the Native^ or Gabriel Oak telling time 
by the stars), and the universal character of his 
dramatis personce. For, after all, Meredith 
deals merely with interesting groups of people, 
only occasionally, as in Clara Middleton, show- 
ing the type; while all Hardy's folk have the 
touch of nature. They interest us not because 
of their individuality, but because they are so 
poignantly human. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 173 

On the second of July, 1905, Meredith wrote 
in a letter to a friend, ^^ Hardy was here some 
days back. I am always glad to see him, and 
have regrets at his going ; for the double reason, 
that I like him, and am afflicted by his twilight 
view of life. ^ ' And one can hardly conceive of 
Mr. Hardy writing so jovial a letter as this, 
written when Meredith was about forty years 
old. ^*I am every morning on the top of Box 
Hill — as its flower, its bird, its prophet. I 
drop down the moon on one side, I draw up the 
sun on toother. I breathe fine air. I shout ha 
ha to the gates of the world. Then I descend 
and know myself a donkey for doing it." The 
last sentence betrays the Englishman. 

Meredith had the modern contempt for asceti- 
cism. In a letter to the Rev. Dr. Jessopp, he 
said, *'Can I morally admire, or reverence, or 
see positive virtue in St. Simeon *? Was he a 
hero, of his kind? Does the contemplation of 
him bring us nearer to God? To what a God! 
I turn aching in all my flesh to adore the Pagan, 
in preference. . . . Don't you see that it is not 
adoration moves the stinking Saint, but, basest 



174 THE ADVANCE OF 

of prostrations, Terror. ... Be not misled by 
this dirty piece of picturesque Eeligiosity, ani- 
mated : my gorge rises ! I hold my nostrils. I 
cry for a Southwest mnd to arise. ' ' 

As a final word on Meredith's religion, it is 
well to cite what he wrote about prayer, in a 
long letter to his son. *^Look for the truth in 
everything, and follow it, and you will then be 
living justly before God. Let nothing flout your 
sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that 
your understanding wavers whenever you 
chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow 
to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. 
The school has only to look through history for 
a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose 
the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. 
Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruit- 
less, but prayer for strength of soul is that 
passion of the soul which catches the gift it 
seeks.'' 

Over and over again he points out the eternal 
consequences of acts. In Ehoda Fleming, he 
says that we are immortal not in what we are, 
but in what we do ; our acts go on forever, and 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 175 

it is only fools who think they can do anything 
and somehow avoid the consequences. 

We feel certain that Meredith was a Theorist, 
a Philosopher, a Moralist, and a Teacher. But 
it is impossible to say exactly what his theory 
of life was, whither his philosophy led him, on 
what his system of ethics was founded, and pre- 
cisely what it is he teaches. Dickens represents 
Sin as something repulsive and malignant, and 
sinners as malicious; look at Quilp. Meredith 
represents sin as Folly, and sinners as Fools. 
Sir Willoughby is an ass ; the two young men in 
Rhoda Fleming are fools; the one who repents 
seems simply to become sane ; the other remains 
a fool, a fool positive. When the husband of 
her friend tries to put his arm around Diana's 
waist, he is represented as not so criminal as 
silly, and he is forgiven. To be sure, the at- 
tempt is the only kind of compliment some men 
know how to pay a woman. 

Meredith's hatred of asceticism and conven- 
tional standards led him in his later work near 
the borders of the rather dangerous doctrine 
that the instincts of the heart are superior to 



176 THE ADVANCE OF 

the statute-book. We must trust nature, he 
seems to say, which is, of course, pagan rather 
than Christian doctrine. Meredith did not be- 
lieve with Jeremiah and Browning in the de- 
ceitfulness and corruption of man's heart. 
Clara is absolutely right in breaking the engage- 
ment; Diana was right in cultivating an inti- 
macy with an outsider; and in Lord Ormont, the 
final step is taken : Aminta leaves her husband, 
simply because she loves another man. 

A contemporary reviewer (1894) said of this 
book that the exposition and the story were 
easily detachable. The story is pretty and al- 
most to the end, natural. The exposition is 
worthless. One hardened critic said he felt 
very uncomfortable in reading the book because 
** Aminta had no case that could be granted in 
a Sioux City divorce court." Now do we ad- 
mire Thackeray less, or more, because he re- 
fused to yield to his passion for Mrs. Brook- 
field? 

Not only did Meredith glorify the instincts of 
the heart at the expense of law and order, he 
glorified the liberty of the individual above all 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 177 

discipline. He himself liad an undisciplined 
mind, and hated system; what would he have 
thought of Germany to-day? Consider his at- 
titude toward the boy Crossjay in the Egoist, 
and think what the "system'' did to Eichard 
Feverel. In attempting to create our sympa- 
thy for Diana after her crooked transaction, he 
made not only a moral but an artistic error, 
and was partially aware of it, for in a letter 
written in 1884, he said, "Diana of the Cross- 
ways keeps me still on her sad last way to wed- 
lock. I could have killed her merrily, with my 
compliments to the public ; and that was my in- 
tention. ' ' 

Meredith is the most chivalrous of novelists, 
and women ought to be fond of him. He loved 
Diana, even though he made her sell the news ; 
and he will not forgive her fiance because the 
latter will not forgive her. Eedworth is the 
real lover; he loves Diana, not her attributes. 
After all, we don't love people for their quali- 
ties, but for themselves. Meredith believed ar- 
dently in woman suffrage, and though he coun- 
selled the militants against violence, it was clear 



178 THE ADVANCE OF 

that lie sympathised with them. He said they 
must have patience and not think that John Bull 
will move for a solitary kick. His attitude 
toward Diana, Lucy, Ehoda and Aminta affords 
sufficient illustration of his chivalrous love of 
women. 

Akin to this feeling — and as un-English as his 
love of France — was his appreciation and glori- 
fication of the Irish. He loved the Celtic race 
with all his heart. His Irish characters illu- 
minate his pages; they shine in strong and in- 
tentional contrast with the stolid Englishmen. 
I think he loved them mainly for their chival- 
rous lack of prudence, for their dash and reck- 
lessness. In Diana, we find the following ob- 
servation: *^ English women and men feel 
toward the quick-witted of their species as to 
aliens, having the demerits of aliens — wordi- 
ness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty 
glitter, the sin of posturing." 

Those who have never read anything of Mere- 
dith, which includes the vast majority of the 
earth's inhabitants, ought to begin with RJioda 
Fleming. It is not only the most normal in 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 179 

style of all liis compositions, it is in many ways 
the most powerfully dramatic. The conflict 
here is between natures that do not and cannot 
understand one another; natures whose hearts 
break, but cannot bend. Besides the leading ac- 
tors, an indelible impression is left on the 
reader's mind by the farmhand Gammon. In a 
house black with awful tragedy, this clod eats 
prodigious meals with undiminished appetite, 
and thus exerts a wholesome influence on all the 
inmates; unconsciously he is a philosopher, 
showing both the importunate necessity, and 
the healing power, of food and sleep. It is plain 
that Meredith is in hearty sympathy with him. 

The characters in Meredith's novels are not 
as a rule abnormal or indeed unusual ; they are 
presented to the reader in an abnormal and un- 
usual manner. He dresses them up in astonish- 
ing motley ; could we strip their souls bare, they 
would be just like other folks. It is the same 
with his incidents; he uses an extraordinary 
style to describe ordinary events. 

In the Egoist, what kind of a girl was Clara? 
Simply a **very nice girl." Her chief claim to 



180 THE ADVANCE OF 

our admiration is her personal beauty. There 
is nothing remarkable about her mind or tem- 
perament, and she might easily be found in a 
novel by Eobert W. Chambers. The distance 
between Mr. Chambers and Meredith is in the 
expense of energy. Clara is normal, like the 
young girls in our popular American writer; 
but Meredith uses all the artillery of his mind in 
bombarding the reader with presentations, in- 
troductions, comments, so that we finally take 
in Clara from every conceivable angle. 

Like most thoughtful men, Meredith was im- 
pressed with the devouring selfishness of the or- 
dinary male. This is brought out in one of the 
earliest and perhaps the greatest of his novels. 
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, where the hero- 
ine is illogically killed in order to emphasise 
the text In the Egoist, of course, we have a 
powerful, minute, and prolonged analysis of the 
one unpardonable sin. Sir Willoughby is a 
blighting and ubiquitous curse; and the most 
cruel moment for him is when at last there 
crosses his brain the shadow of a doubt of his 
own perfection. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 181 

I remember Meredith for certain scenes 
rather than for certain books ; it may be a dam- 
aging admission, but I have never wished a 
single one of his novels to be longer, and am 
usually heartily glad when I come to the end. 
For all his display of fireworks, I find myself 
forgetting his plots, forgetting his characters ; 
I remember the horsewhip in Beauchamp's 
Career more vividly than any of the men or 
women, and I should dislike to humiliate any of 
my friends by asking them pointblank to give an 
accurate resume of the story. The idyllic river 
scene in Richard Fever el, the parting of Eichard 
and Lucy — these stay bright in the memory. 

I am certain that Meredith's style gets be- 
tween the reader and the characters like a 
hedge; at times it is completely opaque. He 
was too much in love with his phrases, and must 
have thought them better than they really are. 
For although it is blasphemous to say so, I re- 
gard the aphorisms in Richard Feverel as in- 
ferior to the aphorisms in Pudd'nhead Wilson. 

Meredith himself was a thousand times more 
interesting than any of his works. The best 



182 THE ADVANCE OF 

part of all Hs stories is where lie shows us most 
of himself. It is vain to classify him, to call 
him realist or romanticist. The marine duet in 
Lord Ormont is pure romanticism, but the elec- 
tion scenes in Beauchamp are pure realism. 
As a rule, however, Meredith never shows us 
our world, as Jane Austen does , he gives us tan- 
talising, fragmentary glimpses of his world. 

Meredith and Browning were alike in their 
tremendous masculinity, in their pre-occupation 
with the passion of love, and in their capacity 
for profound introspection. No intelligent 
reader of literature can fail to notice the points 
of similarity. Oscar Wilde summed them up 
ironically by saying, ^^ Meredith is a prose 
Browning; and so is Browning." 

With Tennyson — ^both in his art and in his 
viewpoint — Meredith had nothing in common. 
The delicacy and conventionality of The Idylls 
of the King infuriated Meredith. ^*The Eol^ 
Grail is wonderful, isn't it? The lines are satin 
lengths, the figures Sevres china. I have not 
the courage to offer to review it. I should say 
such things. To think ! — it 's in these days that 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 183 

the foremost poet of the country goes on fluting 
of creatures that have not a breath of vital hu- 
manity in them ... to hear the chorus of 
praise too ! Why, this stuff is not the Muse, it ^s 
Musery. ... I read the successive mannered 
lines with pain— yards of linen-drapery for the 
delight of ladies who would be in the fashion.'' 
Shortly before his death, Meredith unwill- 
ingly attempted to appraise his novels. In this 
fashion he spoke: ^'I have not made any esti- 
mate of the value of my books in prose. 
The Egoist comes nearer than the other books 
to the proper degree of roundness and finish. 
In Diana of the Crossways my critics own that 
a breathing woman is produced, and I felt that 
she was in me as I wrote. Rhoda Fleming is 
liked by some, not much by me. Richard Fev- 
erel was earnestly conceived, and is in some 
points worthy of thought. Beauchamp's Ca- 
reer does not probe so deeply, but is better work 
on the surface.— I have treated my books of 
prose as the mother bird her fledgelings.'' 

Perhaps the best thing he ever said of his 
own work occurs in his novel Beauchamp's Ca- 



184 THE ADVANCE OF 

reer, although being in a novel, instead of in a 
private letter, the style of saying it is too con- 
sciously elaborate. * ' Those happy tales of mys- 
tery are as much my envy as the popular narra- 
tives of the deeds of bread and cheese people, 
for they both create a tideway in the attentive 
mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous 
flesh to creep, the familiar urging our obese 
imagination to constitutional exercise. And 
oh, the refreshment there is in dealing with 
characters either contemptibly beneath us, or 
supernaturally above ! My way is like a Ehone 
island in the summer drought, stony, unattract- 
ive and difficult between the two forceful 
streams of the unreal and the over-real, which 
delight mankind — honour to the conjurers ! My 
people conquer nothing, win none ; they are ac- 
tual, yet uncommon. It is the clockwork of the 
brain that they are directed to set in motion, 
and — poor troop of actors to empty benches ! — 
the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which 
they would appeal to ; and if you are there im- 
pervious to them, we are lost ; back I go to my 
wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have con- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 185 

tracted the habit of listening to my own voice 
more than is good.'' 

Meredith was a fantastic genius, often reach- 
ing the sublime, often the absurd. The ''leg'' 
business in The Egoist is irritatingly ridiculous, 
and could hardly have been survived by a lesser 
man; his conversations often become fantasti- 
cal, and he leads us to heights where we breathe 
rarefied air, rather than the invigorating breeze 
of the uplands. His pictures of Nature are 
sometimes glorious, sometimes abominably over- 
done. The school scene with which Lord Or- 
mont closes is fantastical, and amid the dialogue 
and incidents of The Amazing Marriage the 
reader moves in a luminous mist. 

If we live long enough, it will be interesting 
to watch the oscillations of Meredith's reputa- 
tion, and to see where he finally comes to rest. 
One irate journalist wrote of him some twenty 
years ago, '^The public which so long neglected 
him was right. The public which now reads 
him is a conscientious public. It has been 
taught to think it likes him, or ought to like him. 
It does not like him ; and the wave of incomplete 



186 THE ADVANCE OF 

popularity, swollen by adroit advertising, will 
presently spend its force and leave Mr. Mere- 
dith permanently stranded on a desolate shore. ' ' 

Well, he is still afloat, despite the storms of 
time and the torpedoes of critics. If he remains 
on the ocean of literature, it will be because his 
natural genius was so great and his own mind 
so interesting that there will always be a select 
class of experienced travellers who will enjoy 
voyages in his company. 

We in America, who have always liked him 
better and understood him more sympathetically 
than his own countr^nnen, ought to remember 
him with pleasure, because he spoke so warmly 
of us. In a letter written in 1886, he said, 
** Americans appear to have received my work 
very generously. Since their most noble clos- 
ing of the Civil War, I have looked to them as 
the hope of our civilisation. . . . Therefore I 
am justly flattered by their praise, if I win it; 
their censure, if they deal it to me, I meditate 
on." 

Just three months before his death, he wrote, 
^^The English, unlike the Americans, have not 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 187 

accepted me in the form of a poet. I had to 
pay for tlie publication of my books of verse. 
Indeed, the run of the novels started from 
American appreciation. ' ' 

Of the bright array of eminent Victorian 
British novelists, only one remains alive — 
Thomas Hardy. He is three-quarters of a cen- 
tury old, but it is not the dignity of age that 
gives him his present commanding position in 
literature ; it is the simple fact that of all living 
English novelists, none can possibly be consid- 
ered his rival. We may indeed truthfully omit 
the word English; there is no writer in the 
world to-day whose prose fiction is of equal 
value. His first novel was published in 1871, 
and then for twenty-five years his works ap- 
peared with no real pause. 

With a third of his life he seems to have 
achieved immortality. What has he done with 
the other two-thirds? Grown up, practised ar- 
chitecture, written much verse, and for the last 
twenty years appeared before the public as a 
professional poet and historical dramatist. 



188 THE ADVANCE OF 

G-ranville Barker had the audacity to put The 
Dynasts on the stage. His next attempt will 
perhaps be the Encyclopcedia Britannica, 

Mr. Hardy's mind is so interesting, so richly 
meditative, so pregnant in fancy, and his view 
of art so architecturally orderly, that anything 
and everything he writes has both value and 
charm; but I regard these last twenty years 
sadly, as I think what might have been ; just as 
I regret the twenty years that Milton spent in 
politics, and as I rejoice over Goethe's refusal 
to do so, or even to become ** patriotic.'' 
Genius is the scarcest thing on earth except ra- 
dium; and to see it wasted is like being adrift 
in an open boat and watching some one wasting 
fresh water. 

Mr. Hardy has written fifteen novels : ten are 
works of genius. I except Desperate Remedies 
because of its immaturity; The Hand of Ethel- 
herta because of its triviality; The Romantic 
Adventures of a Milkmaid because of its slen- 
derness in content ; Jude the Obscure because of 
its hysterical exaggeration; The Well-Beloved 
because of its unreality. There remain ten 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 189 

great contributions to English fiction, ten 
great novels, a few of which, like The Return of 
the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, and 
Tess, are established classics in literature, so 
far as we of to-day can see. And a person who 
should like The Woodlanders best of all — 
though I do not, preferring The Return of the 
Native — would have no need to apologise. 

Mr. Hardy adhered to the old Victorian tra- 
dition in publishing his novels serially. Of the 
fifteen novels, twelve appeared in successive in- 
stalments in periodicals. In fact, only the first 
two originally appeared in book form. Has 
this method had anything to do with the author's 
skill in holding his reader in suspense? Per- 
haps not ; though it is well to remember the fact 
in studying the construction of Far From the 
Madding Crowd. True it is, that although Mr. 
Hardy's novels are full of solidly satisfying 
qualities, not even Conan Doyle or Phillips Op- 
penheim has any more power in compelling the 
reader to turn the next page. The difference 
is that if one tells you in advance the outcome of 
a story by these lesser worthies, your interest is 



190 THE ADVANCE OF 

dead; who reads Oppenheim twice? Whereas 
Mr. Hardy's books gain in excitement every 
time I read them, and there is only one where 
a knowledge of the conclusion subtracts much 
from the interest — A Laodicean; that book is 
different from all the rest of the work of its 
author, and was written under peculiar circum- 
stances. 

Mr. Hardy is just beginning to be known in 
France ; I think he will eventually conquer the 
Continent. Although his subjects are insular, 
his style is not, and his thoughts wander through 
eternity. Mr. Hardy writes as though he lived 
on another planet, and by means of some tre- 
mendous astronomical contrivance, were able 
to see earth's inhabitants life-size, and regard 
them with the exclusive attention of a student, 
himself entirely remote from their concerns. 
He feels as the astronomer of the Lick observa- 
tory felt, when he turned the mighty telescope 
on flaming San Francisco ; he breathed the keen, 
cool air of the mountain-top ; but brought close 
within his vision were some hundreds of thous- 
ands of people living in hell. The astronomer's 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 191 

heart was wrung with pity at the spectacle ; pity 
and horror ; but there was nothing he could do, 
except continue to look. Man's extremity is 
Mr. Hardy's opportunity; but it is an opportun- 
ity only for art. Pessimism will help us all, he 
believes, by taking forever away illusory hopes 
which fade into anguish ; those who expect noth- 
ing cannot be disappointed. The facade of a 
prison, he thinks, is more cheerful to contem- 
plate than the f agade of a palace. At any rate 
we know it to be a prison, and enter it with sub- 
missive despair ; much better so than to have it 
resemble a palace outside. 



CHAPTEE VIII 

CONEAD, GALSWORTHY AND OTHEES 

The triple combination in Joseph Conrad — his lack of 
popularity — not a refractor, but a reflector — ^his tales of the 
sea — his silent women — ethical value of his work — John 
Galsworthy — a satirist — his hatred of British hypocrisy — 
his mistake in The Dark Flower — J. M. Barrie — the con- 
trast between Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizzel 
— May Sinclair — Mary Willcocks. 

Many years ago, when I read for the first time 
The Constitutional History of the United States, 
written by a gentleman in the Black Forest 
called Hermann von Hoist, I was impressed by 
his prefatory remark (in English) that whereas 
there had been many histories of the United 
States, none had equalled this in soberness of 
mind. Although it might have sounded better 
if some one else had said it, the remark was in- 
structive, and serves to separate sheep from 
goats in modern novels. What contemporary 
English novelists write with soberness of mind? 
Surely not Hall Caine, or Conan Doyle, or Flor- 

192 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 193 

ence Barclay, or Eobert Hicliens. Mr. Wells 
and Mr. Bennett! Sometimes, but not all the 
time. Thomas Hardy, always; and with equal 
soberness, though not with equal felicity, 
Joseph Conrad, J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, 
Miss Sinclair, and Miss Willcocks. No modern 
novelists have higher ideals than these five. 

The ability to write for publication m a 
language other than one's mother-tongue is not 
altogether unknown; as is shown by the m- 
stances of Turgenev, Maarten Maartens, Oscar 
Wilde, and Eabindranath Tagore. But the case 
of Joseph Conrad is unique. He knew no Eng- 
lish at all until he was nineteen, and it was not 
until his thirty-eighth year that he published 
anything. When he determined to become an 
author, his perplexity was quite unlike the ob- 
stacle that balks most writers. The question 
that Mr. Conrad put to himself was, "In what 
language shall I write?" Now that is not the 
question that troubles the mind of most men ot 
letters The question that afflicts their peace 
is not. In what language shall I write, but What 
shall I say? I have read a great many novels, 



194 THE ADVANCE OF 

and it is plain that in tlie majority of cases this 
latter is the paramount issue. 

Mr. Conrad's mother-tongue is, of course, 
Polish; but although he had before him the ex- 
ample of Sienkiewicz, there was to be nothing of 
Poland in the books to be written, and every rea- 
son why he should make a direct appeal to a 
wider audience than could possibly be found 
among his countrymen. His first intention was 
to write in French, a language he had known 
from childhood; this impulse was strengthened 
by the fact that he was deeply read in French 
fiction, and really learned the novelist 's art from 
French masters. He has a keen admiration for 
Flaubert and De Maupassant ; and has success- 
fully imitated their calm, deliberate, impersonal 
style. But he had sailed many years under an 
English flag; he knew he must write stories of 
the sea; his closest friends were all English; 
and he loved the vigour of the English tongue. 
His experiences as transmuted into fiction would 
appeal to Anglo-Saxons more than to any other 
people; and these causes combined placed him 
in English literature. It is a great compliment 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 195 

to our language that so thoughtful and ambi- 
tious a man should select it out of a possible 
three. 

Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniovski was born 
in the south of Poland, on the sixth of Decem- 
ber, 1857. He had splendid intellectual ances- 
try. For generations his family had been men 
of fine mental powers, and, what is much rarer 
among the Slavs, of great practical vigour and 
resolution. His father was a revolutionist in 
1862, and was imprisoned, dying in 1870. His 
mother was exiled to Siberia, and died in 1865. 
At the age of twelve he had thus lost both his 
parents, and perhaps began then to develop that 
calm self-reliance so peculiarly characteristic 
of him. As a lad, he longed to get away from 
inland Poland and see the ends of the earth ; he 
particularly had to a high degree what every 
healthy boy has in some measure — the passion 
of the sea. In his stories Heart of Darkness 
and Youth, there are many autobiographical 
passages illustrative of his wanderlust. 

It was in 1878 that he first saw England. He 
settled in Lowestoft (shades of Dickens!) and 



196 THE ADVANCE OF 

scraped acquaintance with all kinds of fishers 
and sea-faring men. He shipped on board a 
coasting-vessel, kept his observant eyes open, 
studied English, studied navigation, and after 
some time secured a mate 's certificate. Then he 
made his first voyage to the East, the effect of 
which on his sensitive mind is shown in Youth; 
this story exhibits his intellectual eagerness and 
the vivid impression made by an exotic world on 
his fresh young heart. 

For nearly twenty years he was a sailor-man, 
in the good old times before the supremacy of 
steam. During the long days out of sight of 
land he was constantly and unconsciously col- 
lecting material for his novels. During the long 
watches of the night his profound and intro- 
spective Slav mind meditated deeply, turning 
over and over thoughts that were some day to 
appear on the printed page. For even in the 
most objective of Conrad's books, there is al- 
ways the reflective cast. His only attempts at 
composition were to be found in the log-book, 
and in occasional letters to his kin in Poland. 

Once John Galsworthy was a passenger. If 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 197 

gossip be true, tlie Englishman's attention was 
attracted to the ship's officer by the latter 's 
loud and fluent and picturesque profanity; all 
of which he must have used up at sea, for there 
is almost no swearing in his books. At all 
events, the two men became intimate friends, 
and have something higher than admiration for 
each other's art. 

In 1894 — great year of modern fiction — 
Mr. Conrad quit the sea, and looked over the 
completed manuscript of Almayer's Folly, 
which he had begun some years before. He 
took lodgings in London and determined to 
spend six months in absolute laziness, for, as he 
expresses it, *'he was seized, suddenly and inex- 
plicably, by a desire to rest." He had dropped 
his last Polish name, for it is not pleasant even 
to men less sensitive than Conrad to hear their 
own family appellation invariably mispro- 
nounced. 

In 1895 appeared his first novel, and since 
that time the history of his life is the history 
of his publications, novel following novel at 
regular and decent intervals. No living man is 



198 THE ADVANCE OF 

better qualified for the literary profession. 
His many years of active life, going down to the 
sea in ships, have stocked his mind with a super- 
abundance of dramatic material; his wide read- 
ing in three modern literatures has taught him 
much about the art of composition ; his sharply 
sensitive and profoundly reflective Slav tem- 
perament has given to his observations and re- 
flections a quaintly original flavour. His face 
to some extent is a map of his soul. He looks 
like a competent, fearless, and highly intelligent 
clipper captain. His eyes have looked on the 
brutality of nature and the brutality of man, and 
are unafraid. It is not an adventurous face; 
it has nothing of George Meredith's reckless- 
ness. It is a face that knows the worst of the 
ocean and the worst of the heart of man, and 
while taking no risks, realising all dangers, is 
calmly, pessimistically resolute. This is not the 
man to lead a forlorn hope, but unquestionably 
the man to leave in charge ; grave, steady, relia- 
ble. 

Apart from his seamanship, he has a really 
extraordinary endowment and equipment as a 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 199 

novelist. A Slav by birth, a Frenchman in 
training, an Anglo-Saxon in activity! His 
Slavonic genius is shown in the skill with which 
he has acquired the English language ; tempera- 
mentally, it is shown in his aloofness ; his lack 
of prejudice; his sincerity, dignity, and truth- 
fulness. The most Slavonic of all his novels is, 
of course, Under Western Eyes, reminiscent of 
Dostoevski; but the temperament appears in 
them all, with the possible exception of Victory, 
a novel quite unworthy of him, and which he has 
apparently tried to write in a manner not his 
own. 

His mastery of English is marvellous, because 
his chief glory is perhaps his style, something 
that only Stevenson has combined with sea-fic- 
tion. Smollett, Scott, Cooper, Marryat, Eus- 
sell, all distinguished in tales of the ocean, have 
no particular rhetorical merit. And Jack Lon- 
don is really an amateur sailor. Like all great 
English writers, Conrad has studied with assi- 
duity the English Bible. There are not many of 
its phrases in his books, but its influence is there. 

Conrad is the heir of Stevenson. Stevenson 



200 THE ADVANCE OF 

died in December, 1894, and the very next year 
appeared Conrad's first novel. It is as though 
Stevenson's soul had migrated to the new man. 
How Stevenson would have enjoyed reading 
Typhoon or The Nigger of the Narcissus, and 
what wonderful letters he would have written 
to Mr. Archer and Mr. Colvin ! In 1895 Kipling 
was in the zenith of his glory, and his tales of 
the East were inspiring the West. Here was 
Conrad's opportunity. Stevenson and Kipling, 
however, were, as they have been rightly called, 
^* observant landsmen"; mere reporters of the 
deep. Joseph Conrad and Pierre Loti are sea- 
dogs and artists. And Conrad is more sincere 
than Loti; he has the Slavonic calmness and 
clearness of vision. The Frenchman is elabor- 
ate, ornamental; indeed, with all his virtues, 
Pierre Loti is a poseur, whether he is talking 
about the sea or about religion; and he has no 
reticence. Conrad is more silent, more grave, 
but just as sensitive as the picturesque French- 
man. 

Conrad has never been a popular writer, and 
a large number of intelligent and well-read per- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 201 

sons have never heard his name. His books 
have not synchronised with public taste. He 
began his literary career at just the moment 
when the new Eomanticism was fashionable, 
when every one was reading The Prisoner of 
Zenda and A Gentleman of France. Now there 
is nothing romantic about Conrad except his 
medium — the sea. At present he is writing in 
the flood-tide of the biographical novel, some- 
thing utterly foreign to his manner as thus far 
displayed. He is the psychologist of sailors; 
a kind of union of Richardson and Smollett; 
and there is no place for him except what he can 
make for himself. Yet, although he has no 
public, he has great fame — his case being analo- 
gous to that of George Meredith and Henry 
James. No living writer has been more highly 
praised by men whose praise is worth having. 
The verdict of thoughtful and high-standard 
critics is practically unanimous. Many cita- 
tions might be made, most of which would seem 
extravagant; we have space only for one, that 
written by John Galsworthy in the Fortnightly 
Review in 1908. Mentioning the list of Con- 



202 THE ADVANCE OF 

rad's novels from 1896 to 1908, Mr. Galsworthy 
remarked, *^The writing of these ten books is 
probably the only writing of the last twelve 
years that will enrich the English language to 
any great extent. '^ He calls his friend **a 
seer,'' and says he has the *^ cosmic spirit." 

Mr. Conrad himself comments, ^^ Praise and 
blame to my mind are of singularly small im- 
port, yet one cares for the recognition of a cer- 
tain ampleness of purpose." If Mr. Conrad 
means he does not care whether he is praised or 
blamed, I do not believe him ; but all he actually 
says here is that he wishes to be taken seriously. 
He need have no misgivings ; his most thought- 
ful admirers take him seriously, and the great 
bulk of readers take him so seriously that they 
refuse to take him at all. One critic calls the 
circle of his readers ^^inexplicably small." 
There is nothing inexplicable about it. A good 
many years ago some one said of Browning that 
he had done less to conciliate and more to influ- 
ence the public than any other man of his time. 
Conrad has no more amenity than Browning. 
Stevenson passed joyously from incident to inci- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 203 

dent ; Conrad holds one incident before our eyes, 
analysing it, reflecting upon it, describing it — 
like a lecturer who talks about something that 
interests him rather than his audience. Con- 
rad is over-careful for popular taste ; over-care- 
ful in minuteness and accuracy of description, 
over-careful in analysis, over-careful in the 
shades of his conversations. And his method 
of construction, shown at its worst in Chance, 
is irritating to all readers, and to some, mad- 
dening. No, the wonder is not that Conrad's 
readers are so few ; the wonder is that they are 
not fewer. That they are steadily increasing 
in number is one more evidence of the standards 
of taste. 

Artists who write to please themselves — that 
is, to satisfy the imperious demands of their con- 
science — are more happy, I must believe, than 
the successful caterers to the public. The man 
who writes novels to please the public is like an 
actor, a singer, a parlour entertainer; his hap- 
piness has passed beyond his control, and is in 
the keeping of others. A slight diminution in 
applause casts a shadow on his heart. Some- 



204 THE ADVANCE OF 

times we hear the absurd remark that actors 
must be tired of coming before the curtain at 
the tenth or eleventh recall. "Why, that is the 
very breath of life to them! Indifference or 
perfunctory applause destroys their happiness ; 
and they are entirely at the me'rcy of the caprice 
of the public. But a serious artist, who does 
his best all the time, even with scant recognition, 
enjoys the pure delight of creation; lack of wide 
recognition cannot make him unhappy, for the 
sources of his pleasure are elsewhere ; and when, 
at the end, fame comes to him, as it is bound to 
come, if he really be a genius, then he has the 
pleasure of gaining the whole world and saving 
his own soul. 

Admirable writer as he is, Conrad can never 
rank with the gxeat Slav novelists, Tolstoi, Tur- 
genev, Dostoevski. For not only does he lack 
the universality of these men, his style — proba- 
bly because he writes in an alien tongue — lacks 
the transparent quality of the Slav masters. 
The style of Tolstoi and Turgenev is like plate 
glass; you do not know whether it is there or 
not, you are so interested in what it reveals, so 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 205 

little aware of the medium of revelation. Now 
Conrad's well- wrought style is highly self-con- 
scious; it is never a happy accident. He is a 
most deliberate artist, and has not only pon- 
dered deeply about his art, but has not hesitated 
to write about it'. He is, as might be expected, 
an intense admirer of Henry James, an author 
who should be offered only to foreign students 
of the most advanced grades. He calls Mr. 
James ^*a great artist,'' and agrees with him 
that Fiction is nearer truth than History. His- 
tory takes documents as a base ; fiction, men and 
women. Both men insist on the dignity of the 
novel. The artist is the interpreter. Some one 
has said we cannot understand Komanised 
Britain because no artists survive who might 
have interpreted it to us; Rome, at the same 
period, we know pretty well. 

Mr. Conrad, in speaking of what is perhaps 
his masterpiece. The Nigger of the Narcissus 
(1897), says, **It is the book by which, not as a 
novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for 
the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing 
to stand or fall." Even at that early stage of 



206 THE ADVANCE OF 

his career he wrote a preface to his book (sup- 
pressed on advice), which would sound preten- 
tious were it not so flamingly sincere ; and which 
gives his artistic creed, a statement of belief to 
which he has always firmly adhered. Every 
reader of Conrad's stories should study this 
preface ; and one passage should be quoted here. 
''The artist appeals to that part of our being 
which is not dependent on wisdom ; to that in us 
which is a gift and not an acquisition — and, 
therefore, more permanently enduring. He 
speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, 
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives : 
to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain: to 
the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation 
— and to the subtle but invincible conviction of 
solidarity that knits together the loneliness of 
innumerable hearts to the solidarity in dreams, 
in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in 
hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, 
which binds together all humanity — the dead to 
the living and the living to the unborn. ' ' 

This preface might have been written by 
Fielding to Tom Jones, except for one phrase, 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 207 

'Hhe sense of mystery surrounding our lives''; 
for that sense of mystery does not appear in 
eighteenth century fiction, and its total absence 
from Tom Jones prevents that novel from being 
the best novel in the English language. The 
novel has advanced since 1749. 

Conrad stands alone in modern fiction, be- 
longing to no school, and under the influence of 
no group. He has a praiseworthy impatience 
with dogmas like Eealism, Sentimentalism, 
Naturalism, Romanticism, saying, ^'Liberty of 
the imagination is the most precious possession 
of a novelist.'' He insists, too, that no matter 
how objective a novelist may be, he never de- 
scribes the world — he describes his own world, 
the world as he sees it. And in order to de- 
scribe even this subjective world, he must rid 
himself not only of artistic dogmas, but philo- 
sophical ones, like pessimism and optimism. 
Optimism may seem jauntily shallow, but pes- 
simism, says Mr. Conrad, is intellectual arro- 
gance. Consistent pessimists are certainly, I 
think, rarer than consistent optimists. Mr. 
Conrad says that every attempt to explain this 



208 THE ADVANCE OF 

universe ethically is a failure; but, to use his 
phrase, it is a * ^ spectacular ' ' universe, full of 
wonder, mystery, delight — above all, interest- 
ing. Thus those realists who attempt to repre- 
sent life as dully monotonous would seem to be 
barred by Conrad from the ranks of true novel- 
ists. For my part, however dull life at times 
may be, I have never found life, even in its grey- 
est moments, so dull as many books that profess 
to describe it. 

Those that have not yet surrendered to Con- 
rad, and many there be that are offended in 
him, — and also those who have not read him at 
all, should read first, Typhoon and then The 
Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad's stories of 
the East sound to me — who have never been 
there, and am quite willing to see it through bet- 
ter eyes than my own — more truthful than Kip- 
ling's. The latter is a born exaggerator, inca- 
pable of moderation — witness his remarks in the 
present war — Conrad is more cool, more aloof. 
Like his famous Captain in Typhoon, Conrad 
describes fearful storms in nature and frightful 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 209 

passions in man, with an extraordinary poise — 
the calm of the observant artist. 

The literature of all nations is filled with de- 
scriptions of the wrath of the ocean; thousands 
of writers have done their best to reproduce in 
the mind of the reader the sublime and terrible 
spectacle. But I do not think I have read any- 
where a more real account than in Typhoon; one 
feels engulfed, like the two men on the bridge. 
Yet the originality and power of this wonderful 
story do not lie mainly in the pictures of the 
storm; the true interest is in the struggle be- 
tween the hideous forces of nature at their 
worst, and the skill of one man. Captain Mac- 
Whirr is the only person who can beat the sea. 
He conquers the ocean, because he has no more 
imagination than the ocean, really no more sen- 
tient life than the ocean. Nature is ruthless, 
unconscious, unaware; but so is Captain Mac- 
Whirr. And in this Captain, nature meets her 
master, because joined with equal unconscious- 
ness is the power of intention ; definite purpose. 
He is there to save his ship, and he intends to 



210 THE ADVANCE OF 

save it. His quelling the riot on board with the 
same inflexible discipline that he would have ob- 
served on a calm night illustrates his character. 
Conrad has shown us clearly what manner of 
man he is in the extraordinary incident of the 
change of flags ; and now in the tempest his very 
inertia wears out the patience of the storm. 
Had he possessed one spark of self-conscious- 
ness, one flash of imagination, his ship would 
have been lost. He has the invincible courage 
that goes with essentially stupid minds ; he has 
no fear because the possibility of choice does 
not even occur to him. Captain MacWhirr is 
as stupid as Destiny itself; and in this adven- 
ture seems to defeat Destiny. 

In The Nigger of the Narcissus, and if I 
could have only one of Conrad's books, I would 
take this one, Conrad shows his profound sym- 
pathy with the children of the forecastle. I 
wonder if he exhibited as much sympathy with 
them when he was in active command as he does 
in the pages of this book? This is a real ^^ sea- 
story,'' with appropriate incidents, but differ- 
entiated from its class by profound and subtle 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 211 

psychological analysis. To see what mere 
thoughtfulness has done to the art of fiction, it 
is instructive to compare Cooper's Long Tom 
Coffin in The Pilot with old Singleton in this 
narrative. It is the difference between child- 
hood and maturity. Sea-fiction has ** grown 
up/' has become deeply reflective as well as de- 
scriptive, is taking itself earnestly. Conrad 
would not write like Cooper if he could; and 
Cooper could not have written like Conrad, be- 
cause between the two came the whole Victo- 
rian age of serious thought. This is a tale of the 
sea, written by one who loved it, who loved it 
with exaggerated intensity in the safe glow of 
reminiscence; but it is written with soberness 
of mind, with the intent to reveal the very heart 
of human mystery. 

Although Conrad denounces pessimism, most 
of his stories are deeply tragic, are full of the 
sickness of heart that comes from deferred 
hopes, full of frustration and despair. He ex- 
cels particularly in the depiction of remorse. 
Prometheus was comfortable compared to these 
men and women of Conrad, whose hearts are 



212 THE ADVANCE OF 

torn by the vulture of memory. His tragedies 
usually happen in far-off places, India or Africa 
— or they happen to obscure and unimportant 
people in big western cities. His first book, 
Almayer^s Folly, is an illustration of the first, 
The Secret Agent of the second. No imagina- 
tive reader can possibly forget the awful scene 
toward the close of Almayer, where the man 
carefully obliterates the traces of the girPs foot- 
steps. 

Conrad's women are highly interesting, al- 
though unlike any women I have ever met. 
They have an endless capacity for suffering with 
no power of articulation. Most women that I 
have known suffer less and talk more. There 
is something hideous in the dumb pain of these 
creatures. They open not their mouths. In 
the story of Falk, the awful remorse of the man 
who has eaten a human body is confronted with 
the stolid silent suffering of the passionate 
woman who loves him. In The Secret Agent, 
the woman is in hell all the time; but no one 
can get a word out of her. In Chance, it is 
plain that the young girl is not happy ; yet every 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 213 

attempt to elicit from her any speech that shall 
give a key to her pain so that it can be relieved, 
is fruitless ; all that a friend can do is to adopt 
a policy of watchful waiting, successful in this 
instance as it catches the young lady in the quiet 
but determined effort at suicide. These pas- 
sive, undemonstrative, silent women have a 
reticence that is maddening; one feels that if 
they were physically ill, the greatest diagnos- 
tician in the world could make nothing of them ; 
would have to resort to the wildest guesses. 
We all of us know persons who are undemon- 
strative, though they are sufficiently rare to 
seem eccentric ; but where has Conrad met these 
women who are totally unresponsive ! who greet 
small-talk, threats, curses, honest enquiry, and 
affectionate solicitude with nothing but stead- 
fast eyes, in which the fires of the pit are 
smouldering 1 I had rather dwell on the house- 
top with a contentious woman in a continual 
dropping of water than with one of these crea- 
tures who look so significant and never by any 
chance say anything. 

Conrad himself as a novelist is taciturn, ex- 



214 THE ADVANCE OF 

ceedingly chary of comment. Compare him 
with a garrulous artist like Thackeray, who chat- 
ters at his helpless reader with the fluency of 
a barber ! Conrad is unlike the English novel- 
ists in his silent gravity, and he is totally un- 
like the Germans in his brevity and lack of sen- 
timent. He points out to us the wonder of the 
sea, but he indulges in no rhapsodies thereupon ; 
he shows us the variety of human nature in one 
forecastle, with no moralising and no gush — 
merely an occasional query, as, why do those 
sailors read only Bulwer-Lytton? 

Conrad is not always easy reading; partly 
because of his solidity of phrase, partly because 
of his peculiar method, illustrated at its ex- 
treme in Chance. He wishes to get the vital 
effect of the first person talking without making 
the chief character speak. Thus we have the in- 
terposition of Marlow, who is a good deal of a 
bore. The reader is four removes from Con- 
rad's mind. We get at the characters and the 
events of the story through what some one has 
said to some one else, who is a friend of Mar- 
low's, who in turn reports to us. This gives 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 215 

Conrad full opportunity to show his characters 
in all kinds of reflected lights, and from all man- 
ner of angles; but it is sometimes perplexing. 
The fact is that while Dickens is a refracting 
telescope, Conrad is a reflector. Dickens turns 
the lens of his powerful imagination directly on 
individuals like Micawber or Dick Swiveller, and 
with their qualities magnified, and brought close 
to the reader, we see them in a strong light and 
they become hugely interesting. Conrad does 
not have us look directly at the object, but rather 
at a mirror in which the object is reflected. 
This mirror may be simply the effect produced 
on some other person or persons by the leading 
character, or it may be simply the clear surface 
of Mario w's mind. At all events we regard the 
character in its reflected image, rather than in 
a direct gaze. 

Although no novelist preaches less, Conrad's 
books are based on the axiom of the moral law. 
Ethically, his novels are sound. Perhaps the 
most impressive from the moral point of view 
is the long story. Under Western Eyes, where 
the student, who had everything to lose and 



216 THE ADVANCE OF 

nothing to gain by confession, suffered such in- 
tolerably acute agony of conscience (sharpened 
by love) that he could retain the truth not an- 
other moment; just as Easkolnikov, in Crime 
and Punishment, a book which this one in cer- 
tain features resembles, had to give himself up 
to the police. 

One reason why Conrad ^s characters with all 
the infinite detail we have of them do not seem 
so real as the persons in Jane Austen, is be- 
cause the method of portraiture is not photo- 
graphic. Each one of Jane Austen's men and 
women is an accurate reproduction. Conrad's 
people are made in the fusion of memory and 
thought. They are not given to the reader un- 
til the novelist has thought about them intensely. 
He sees them clearly but loves to speculate about 
them. 

Two of his stories are quite different from 
the others. After all his studies of despair, it 
is interesting to read his charming, humorous, 
sympathetic and altogether delightful tale, The 
Point of Honour. It is a kind of allegory of the 
struggle between good and evil, with the triumph 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 217 

of good. For the other exception I can find in 
my mind little favourable comment. The story 
Victory reads as though it were intended to gain 
for its author a wider audience, as though he 
had tried to write in a * * popular ' ' manner. De- 
spite many fine passages of description, it is 
poor stuff, and its author should be ashamed of 
Mr. Jones, who belongs to cheap melodrama. 
It is to me inconceivable that Conrad should 
deliberately lower his ideal, or hoist a white flag 
to the hostile majority. If that were true. Vic- 
tory would be a defeat. I regard it simply as 
one of those lapses of which nearly all great 
writers have shown themselves capable. 

John Galsworthy is a notable figure in con- 
temporary literature, having enjoyed something 
like real fame for about ten years. He is a 
novelist and a dramatist of distinction ; a maker 
of respectable verse ; above all, a satirist. He 
looks on the world with disapproval, and on 
England with scorn; the latter attitude has of 
course been modified by the war. I used to won- 
der what all these writers who have used the 
great middle-class of England as the butt of 



218 THE ADVANCE OF 

their contempt and ridicule would do in the 
event of a national crisis; for then the only 
agency that could save England would be this 
same despised middle-class. Well, they have 
all become emotional — as emotional as pious dis- 
senters — and solemnly *^ patriotic," except 
Bernard Shaw. To him the British are as 
ridiculous and contemptible in the hour of dan- 
ger as they were in the days of safety. 

His first important book was called The Island 
Pharisees, which might stand as the title of his 
complete works. Satire is here more prepon- 
derant than art, and the novel falls by its weight. 
The publication of this book seemed to cleanse 
his bosom of much perilous stuff, for it was fol- 
lowed in two years by his masterpiece. The Man 
of Property, one of the best English novels of 
the twentieth century. There is a-plenty of sa- 
tire, but the burlesques of the former book have 
become real portraits. That family of brothers 
is a triumph — ^Svhere do you get your wine, and 
what do you pay for it ! " Yet even in this fine 
work occurs the obsession of Mr. Galsworthy, a 
marriage without love, where the husband shows 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 219 

intolerable cruelty in insisting on embracing his 
wife, and hideous selfishness in objecting to her 
gratifying her passions with another man. The 
husband is certainly an offensive person, and in 
the Eestoration Drama would have received ap- 
propriate frontal decorations ; but the unpreju- 
diced observer may enquire, If the lady did 
not and could not love this man, why did she 
marry him 1 When women marry, some of them 
anyhow are old enough to know better ; and the 
real test of character is not the making of an 
unwise marriage, but the behaviour of a person 
after the unwise marriage is made. Mr. Gals- 
worthy returns to this theme more than once, 
and so overstates it in The Fugitive as to de- 
prive the play of any hitting power. For it is 
not only the law of marriage he would have us 
repeal, it is the law of causation. 

Mr. Galsworthy insists that he is not a par- 
tisan, but a chronicler; he is certainly acute, 
thoroughly honest in purpose, and essentially 
noble. I like him best where he lives closest to 
his creed, as in the account of the Forsyte fam- 
ily in The Man of Property, in the play Strife, 



220 THE ADVANCE OF 

and in the most charming of all his novels, The 
Patrician. But he has an actively moral, as 
well as an artistic, conscience ; his temperament 
is plainly radical, and his sympathies are al- 
ways with those who are opposed to the present 
social organisation. The word Respectability 
makes him see red. No German has said worse 
things of England's hypocrisy than some of her 
own present-day novelists. 

The much-praised Country House I found 
dull, and the only beneficial effect I obtained 
from its perusal was deep and refreshing sleep. 
The Dark Flower I found worse than dull ; it is 
a blot in the fair 'scutcheon of its author. In his 
latest novel. The Freelands, a wise woman ob- 
jects to visiting her sister-in-law because at her 
house she feels herself *^all body'' ; in The Dark 
Flower J one has the same sensation. The char- 
acters are all body, and no soul. Every writer 
of noble mind — and Mr. Galsworthy surely be- 
longs to that class — ^must desire not merely 
many readers, but the test readers, the most 
select, the most intelligent, the most critical. 
He wishes to have his works read primarily by 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 221 

those who are able to understand them. Now 
the penalty for emphasising instinct rather than 
thought, for analysing states of physical sensa- 
tion rather than states of mind, is the lowering 
of one's clientele. For example, a genius like 
Guy de Maupassant ought to be read only by 
the most intelligent men and women; whereas, 
thanks to his sex-obsession, the majority of his 
readers to-day all over the world are low- 
browed, morbid adolescents who find in him ex- 
actly what they are looking for. This will go 
on from generation to generation : instead of be- 
ing read with mental delight, he will be read with 
a leer. 

Despite all the foolish praise heaped upon 
Theophile Gautier, his most infamous novel 
holds its circulation through pornography ; Mr. 
Booth Tarkington is quite right when he says 
that were it not for this element, it would not 
have twenty readers a year. 

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth 
speaketh. We expect base language from base 
minds. Therefore such a book as The Dark 
Flower coming from Mr. Galsworthy, is not only 



222 THE ADVANCE OF 

in itself distressing; it is a distressing surprise. 
He writes there as many men in the forties — 
dangerous years — secretly think; they are re- 
gretting the lost opportunities of their physical 
youth, regretting, not their sins, but old vetoes 
of conscience. Such a work as The Dark Flower 
has an unpleasantness that a writer of lower 
grade could not have produced ; lilies that fester 
smell far worse than weeds. 

The first half of The Freelands (1915) is 
wholly delightful; it has all the charm of The 
Patrician, with the added effect of even maturer 
art. In the burning of the rick the conflagration 
consumes not merely grass of the field, but all 
the natural beauty of the story ; which straight- 
way becomes tiresome and pedantic. The boy 
is a prig, and we can only hope that Nedda will 
remain as blind to his inherent dulness after 
marriage as she is before. The great redeeming 
feature of this novel is the character of Granny 
Freeland. She is as real as life itself; no one 
who pays any attention to her can help loving 
her. The unselfishness, resignation, tenderness, 
and gentleness that long years have taught her 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 223 

contrast sharply with the egotistic dogmatic 
assurance of her grandson. For, as Browning 
says, the young man struts along as though he 
owned the world; the old man walks the pave- 
ment quietly, asking for nothing, merely hoping 
that nobody will kill him. Her delightful little 
remedies are ironically shown up by the author ; 
but after all, they are real remedies for real 
(and curable) troubles. 

A German who should read this book might 
easily be pardoned for believing that the best 
thing that could happen to Great Britain would 
be its conquest by Germany. 

J. M. Barrie, the greatest, most profound, 
most original British dramatist of our time, is 
so deservedly eminent in that field that we are 
almost forgetting he belongs also in the history 
of the English novel. To be sure, he has writ- 
ten only one masterpiece, Sentimental Tommy, 
and he followed that with an inept sequel. 
Tommy and Grizzeh In 1892 Stevenson wrote 
to him, * ^ I am proud to think you are a Scot<ih- 
man. ... I am a capable artist; but it begins 
to look to me as if you were a man of genius.'' 



224 THE ADVANCE OF 

A few months before his death, informed that 
he was the boy-model for Sentimental Tomyny, 
he wrote, * ' My dear Barrie, I am a little in the 
dark about this new work of yours : what is to 
become of me afterwards? You say carefully 
— methought anxiously — that I was no longer 
me when I grew up? I cannot bear this sus- 
pense: what is it? It's no forgery? and am I 
Jiangitf'^ 

The boy in Sentimental Tommy is just as 
truly the eternal boy as is Tom Sawyer ; omit his 
love for the specific word, he has the charm, the 
imitativeness, the histrionic vein, the vanity, 
the laziness, the meanness, the colossal selfish- 
ness of all small boys. The Russians tell us 
not to blame the mirror if the face looks ugly. 
No honest man can read Sentimental Tommy 
without seeing himself reflected, minus the gen- 
ius for composition. It is one of the most bril- 
liant and most unpleasant works of our time; 
unpleasant because it does for every man what 
Hamlet did for his mother — it tells us what we 
really are. We cannot help being delighted with 
its humour — ^* don't say ^ me thinks' so often" 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 225 

—but it has caused much melancholy and let us 
hope beneficial heart-searching. 

The sequel, Tommy and Grizzel, was not 
needed. It is as though Mr. Barrie were afraid 
we should not see the moral, should not see our 
danger, should not see that the destination 
whither selfishness leads is tragic both for the 
protagonist and his associates; he therefore, 
throwing aside subtlety, roared a moral in our 
ears, pointing to the gibbet like any Hogarth. 
It was bad enough, in all conscience, to have 
Tess hanged, but to have Tommy hanged is like 
a very bad joke that leaves the whole company 
in an embarrassed silence. 

To die for faction is a common evil, 

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. 

In the year 1904 Charlotte Bronte revisited 
the glimpses of the moon, wrote a strange novel 
called The Divine Fire and returned to the Ely- 
sian Fields. She signed the work by the then 
unfamiliar name of May Sinclair; and although 
the British audience for whom it was intended 
paid no attention to it, many thousands of Amer- 



226 THE ADVANCE OF 

icans read it with such enthusiasm that echoes 
were aroused on the other side, and the English 
are now proud to claim what is theirs. In this 
particular literary conflagration, the divine fire 
was mingled with much smoke ; but the flashes 
in the darkness were veritable flames, and May 
Sinclair is to-day the foremost living writer 
among English-speaking women. She has a 
hectic, feverish, high-tension manner that is not 
really unhealthy; it is more the overflowing of 
pent-up passion. For none of her books is made 
by the scraping together of what lies in the 
dusty corners of the mind; and no one of her 
books is made to order; they are more like es- 
caping steam, that cannot be repressed another 
instant. They are the outcome, in other words, 
of fiercely held convictions. If she could not 
write, she would burst. 

This white-hot intensity is just as character- 
istic of The Helpmate, The Judgment of Eve, 
The Three Sisters, The Belfry, as it is of The 
Divine Fire. The Helpmate and The Judgment 
of Eve represent exactly opposite points of 
view, for which, however, these two books afford 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 227 

excellent illustrations. It is amusing to remem- 
ber that when the former appeared in the Atlan- 
tic Monthly, there was a great fluttering in the 
Boston dovecotes; and if I remember rightly, 
some kind of editorial apology was demanded 
and given; it seemed that the first chapter was 
perused in the absence of the Head, and that, 
with the distinguished name of the author, was 
the warrant to advance at full speed. But 
one steps on a firecracker in the very first chap- 
ter! 

Miss Sinclair is a looker-on at the game of 
marriage, which gives her the vantage-ground 
for observing the mistakes of both players. 
The Helpmate castigates the woman, and The 
Judgment of Eve lashes the man. The whip in 
each case descends on the guilty party, although 
women are sure to believe The Helpmate most 
needed, while men will own to the necessity of 
The Judgment of Eve. We love and applaud 
all literary and oratorical castigation. No 
man can read about the peevish importunity of 
the tuppenny husband over his outing suit, with- 
out feeling as David did when Nathan pushed 



228 THE ADVANCE OF 

the application home. I am sorry that The 
Judgment of Eve has not had a wider circula- 
tion. It is exactly the book which every reader 
will feel that his neighbours ought to read. 

In The Three Sisters, Miss Sinclair ap- 
proaches perihelion. This is the best book she 
has written, wrought with an art that has be- 
come thoroughly mature. The influence of the 
three Bronte sisters is more real than apparent ; 
the spirit of the book shows the same unsatis- 
fied thirst for life, the same frustration of pas- 
sion, that one feels in Jane Eyre and in Wuther- 
ing Heights, "Woman's inhumanity to woman 
is the basis of the plot ; and although the scene 
is laid in a country parsonage, although the 
rector and his three daughters are all tech- 
nically virtuous, the divine fire has become 
sulphurous; it is really the flame of hell. I 
know of no solution for the problem presented 
by the novelist except polygamy. 

No man by any possiblity could ever have 
drawn that oldest sister; she is a ** designing 
creature," presented with subtle art. This is 
a real novel, an important novel ; it has a real 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 229 

story, startlingly real characters, has no thesis, 
and means nothing except as a significant rep- 
resentation of life. 

The most steadily entertaining novel that 
Miss Sinclair has written is The Belfry. The 
last scenes are a concession to the dominating 
interest of the Great War, but they were neces- 
sary to bring out the character of the strange 
hero. This book again is filled with real peo- 
ple, and British ** respectability'^ is treated, not 
with the scorn of Galsworthy, Bennett, and 
Wells, but with all a woman's patience for the 
stupidity and narrowness of humanity. Her 
^'respectable" folk here are irritating at times, 
but they are charming too. 

Miss Sinclair has made astonishing progress 
in literary art since the composition of The 
Divine Fire; there is no comparison at all be- 
tween that book and The Belfry, No two of 
her books are alike ; she is more than versatile : 
she has something of the range of humanity it- 
self. What an extraordinary power of con- 
trast is shown in the clergyman of The Three 
Sisters if you compare him with the Canter- 



230 THE ADVANCE OF 

bury cleric in The Belfry! The two men, how- 
ever, are no more milike than the two books they 
adorn. As Miss Sinclair grows older, her eyes 
become more and more achromatic: in The 
Divine Fire, she saw life through all kinds of 
fantastic colours ; now she sees the world as it 
really is. And how infinitely more interesting 
the actual world is than any of our illusions 
about it! 

Miss Mary Patricia Willcocks, of Devonshire, 
is not nearly so well known as she deserves to 
be. For many years a school-teacher, the 
stream of her activity turned in 1905 to fiction, 
and in 1907 she wrote a novel of great power 
and charm. The Wingless Victory. The manu- 
script completely captured the heart of that 
seasoned publisher, John Lane ; nor do I think 
any intelligent person could read this book 
without feeling that the author belongs to litera- 
ture. The most notable feature of her work is 
its deep thoughtfulness, its active cerebration, 
as differei:it from the reflected culture of Mrs. 
"Ward as could well be imagined. She repeated 
her success in 1908 with A Man of Genius, an- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 231 

other skilful diagnosis of human sickness. 
Then, unfortunately, her later novels, The Way 
Up, and Wings of Desire, while written with 
real distinction, are too strongly flavoured with 
the author's ^^ opinions/' The fact that she is 
a feminist and naturally radical, ought not in 
the least to have injured her literary work ; for 
she probably held the same convictions when 
she wrote the Wingless Victory. No, she has 
allowed her ^* views" to trespass in the pleasant 
pastures of her art, where they seem at any rate 
out of place. 

But when I remember who she is, what she 
has accomplished, and that she lives in Devon, 
I have high hopes. 



CHAPTER IX 

TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH NOVELISTS 

Contemporary Novelists in Great Britain — Samuel Butler 
— Bernard Shaw — Eden Phillpotts — George Moore and the 
Experimental Novel— H. G. Wells— W. J. Locke— Alfred 
Ollivant— Mrs. W. K. Clifford— Maiy Cholmondeley— W. 
B. Maxwell— Leonard Merrick— H. H. Bashford— A. S. M. 
Hutchinson — St. John Endne. 

I AM reminded of old Vigneron's remark about 
Meyerbeer ; for Samuel Butler died without my 
noticing it; I didn't even know he was sick. 
Shortly after his cremated ashes had been scat- 
tered to the winds of heaven, a learned lady 
asked me if I knew anything about Samuel But- 
ler. Although I have ceased to be shocked at 
anything the azure-footed say or do, I did feel 
a penumbra of chagrin, for I earn my bread by 
teaching English Literature. I proceeded to 
emit a few platitudes about Hudibras, when I 
was sharply interrupted, and informed that the 
subject for discussion was the great Samuel 
Butler, the Samuel Butler, ' * the greatest novel- 

232 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 233 

est of tlie nineteenth century.'^ This is a title 
that few writers of modern fiction have escaped, 
and I breathed easier. ^'Ignorance, Madam, 
pure ignorance," — ^how often Johnson has 
helped us ! 

Now I am grateful to mj fair tutor, for while 
the name of the Erewhon philosopher must 
eventually have penetrated even into academic 
circles, t might have remained a few months 
longer in the outer darkness, and thus have 
postponed my acquaintance with The Way of 
All Flesh, Butler spent a good many years 
writing this extraordinary book, and finished 
it a good many years ago, but in 1902, on his 
deathbed, gave for the first time, permission to 
have it printed, characteristically reversing the 
conventional deathbed repentance and confes- 
sion. He, who had abandoned all faith except 
in his own infallibility, ardently believed in his 
posthumous fame, which has become a reality. 
Its slow growth seems to indicate permanence. 

It is a curious fact that the two Samuel But- 
lers — the seventeenth century poet and the nine- 
teenth century novelist — should have held pre- 



234 THE ADVANCE OF 

cisely the same attitude toward religious prig- 
gery. Neither could endure the organised 
and dominant chureh-going-christianity of his 
epoch. What the Burlesquer said of the Puri- 
tans neatly expresses the contempt felt by his 
namesake. 

A sect whose chief devotion lies 
In odd, perverse antipathies, 
In falling out with that or this 
And finding somewhat still amiss; 
More peevish, cross, and splenetic 
Than dog distract or monkey sick: 
That with more care keep holyday 
The wrong, than others the right way; 
Compound for sins they are inclined to 
By damning those they have no mind to. 

And the late W. E. Henley's summary of the 
first Samuel Butler fits the second almost with- 
out the change of a word. I give it verbatim. 
''He had an abundance of wit of the best and 
truest sort; he was an indefatigable observer; 
he knew opinions well, and books even better; 
he had considered life acutely and severely; as 
a rhythmist he proceeded from none and has had 
his vocabulary is of its kind in- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 235 

comparable; his work is a very hoard of sen- 
tences and saws, of vigorous locutions and pic- 
turesque colloquialisms, of strong sound sense 
and robust English. ' ' 

Bernard Shaw, taking his eye off Brieux for 
a moment, informed us that he learned more 
from Butler than from any other writer; a 
statement easier to believe than some of his 
affirmations. Unfortunately the disciple is so 
much above his lord in popular estimation, that 
we have all been withholding honour where 
honour is due. After one has read Butler, one 
sees where many of Shaw's perversities and 
ironies came from. The foundation of Butler's 
style is the paradox; moral dynamics are re- 
versed ; the unpardonable sin is conventionality. 
His masterpiece answers no questions; solves 
no problems; chases away no perplexities. 
Every reader becomes an interrogation point. 
Butler rubs our thoughts the wrong way. As 
axiom after axiom is ruthlessly attacked, we 
pick over our minds for some missile to throw 
at him. It is a good thing for every man and 
woman whose brain happens to be in activity 



236 THE ADVANCE OF 

to read this amazingly clever, original, brilliant, 
diabolical novel. And for those whose brains 
are in captivity it may smash some fetters. 
Every one who understands what he reads will 
take an inventory of his own religions and 
moral stock. 

Butler delighted in the role of Advocatus Dia- 
boli: in his Note-Boohs he has the following 
apology for the Devil: *^It must be remembered 
that we have heard only one side of the case. 
God has written all the books.'' Well, He cer- 
tainly did not write this one ; He permitted the 
Devil to have his hour. The worst misfortune 
that can happen to any person, says Butler, is 
to lose his money; the second is to lose his 
health ; and the loss of reputation is a bad third. 
He seems to have regarded the death of his 
father as the most fortunate event in his own 
life; for it made him financially independent. 
He never quite forgave the old man for hanging 
on till he was eighty years old. He ridiculed 
the Bishop of Carlisle for saying that we long 
to meet our parents in the next world. ' ' Speak- 
ing for myself, I have no wish to see my father 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 237 

again, and I think it likely that the Bishop of 
Carlisle would not be more eager to see his than 
I mine/' Melchisedec **was a really happy 
man. He was without father, without mother, 
and without descent. He was an incarnate 
bachelor. He was a born orphan.'' 

One reason why The Way of All Flesh is be- 
coming every year more widely known, is be- 
cause it happens to be exactly in the literary 
form most fashionable in fiction at this moment. 
It is a ^^life" novel — it is a biography, which of 
course means that it is very largely an auto- 
biography. Three generations of the hero's 
family are portrayed with much detail ; the plot 
of the story is simply chronological; the only 
agreeable woman in the book was a personal 
friend of the author. Not only are hundreds 
of facts in the novelist's own life minutely re- 
corded, it is a spiritual autobiography as well. 
It was his habit — also true of Arnold Bennett — 
to carry a notebook in his pocket; whenever a 
thought or fancy occurred to him, immediately 
to write it down. An immense number of these 
fatherless ideas are now inwoven in this novel. 



238 THE ADVANCE OF 

The result is that the reader literally finds 
something interesting and often something val- 
uable on every page. The style is so closely 
packed with thought that it produces constant 
intellectual delight. This is well; for I can re- 
call no delight of any other kind. 

Just as Samuel Butler poured out in Hudibras 
the accumulated bottled venom and hatred of 
many years, so our novelist has released all the 
repugnance, the rebellion, the impotent rage of 
childhood. He had an excellent memory, and 
seems to have forgiven nothing and forgotten 
nothing that happened to him in the dependent 
years of his life. It is an awkward thing to 
play with souls, and Butler represents the souls 
of boys treated by their parents and by their 
school-teachers with astonishing stupidity and 
blundering brutality. It is a wonderful treatise 
on the art of how not to bring up children; and 
I should think that every mother, father, and 
teacher would feel some sense of shame and 
some sense of fear. For a good many years 
children are in the power of their elders, who 
so greatly excel them in both physical strength 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 239 

and in cunning ; but every child, no matter how 
dutifully he may kiss the rod, becomes in after 
years the Judge of his parents and of his teach- 
ers. Butler's sympathy with children, whose 
little bodies and little minds are often in abso- 
lute bondage to parents both dull and cruel, is a 
salient quality in his work. One is appalled 
when one remembers how often the sensitive 
soul of a little boy is tortured at home, simply 
by coarse handling. This championship of 
children places Butler with Dickens, though I 
suppose such a remark would have been re- 
garded by Butler as an insult. 

I think that the terrific attack on ^^ professing 
Christians'' made in this novel will be of real 
service to Christianity. Just as men of strong 
political opinions have largely abandoned the 
old habit of reading the party paper, and now 
give their fiercest opponents a hearing, so I 
think good Christian people will derive much 
benefit from an attentive perusal of this work. 
The religion that Butler attacks is the religion 
of the Scribes and Pharisees, and unless our re- 
ligion exceeds that, none of us is going to enter 



240 THE ADVANCE OF 

the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church needs 
clever, active antagonists to keep her up to the 
mark; the principle of Good is toughened by 
constant contact with the principle of Evil; 
every minister ought to have in his audience a 
number of brilliant, determined opponents, who 
have made up their minds they will believe 
nothing he says; I have no doubt that God 
needs the Devil. 

Thus, although I firmly believe this is a dia- 
bolical novel, I think it will prove to be of serv- 
ice to Christianity. I know it has done me 
good. I cannot forget Butler's remark about 
^11 those church-goers who would be equally 
shocked if any one doubted Christianity or if 
any one practised it. 

Butler's attitude toward everything except 
Handel and himself was ironical; he delighted 
in ridiculing any generally accepted tenet in 
politics, science, art, and religion. This was 
often done behind a mask of grave, candid en- 
quiry, in the manner of Swift. Even his per- 
sonal appearance was ironical, for although he 
could truthfully have said ^*I have fought the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 241 

good faith/* he looked like a devout, and rather 
ignorant evangelical parson.^ 

Butler's most famous disciple, Mr. Shaw, 
would be a novelist of high reputation were it 
not for the fact that, like Mr. Barrie, he has 
achieved greater renown in another field. Yet 
Cashel Byron's Profession is just as good a 
novel in 1916 as it was in the eighties, when it 
was written ; and we all know the enthusiasm it 
awakened in Stevenson, who read it when its 
author's name had no significance. In sheer 
literary excellence Shaw's later and more 
famous works do not surpass this book; and it 
possesses one quality absent in all the plays, 
both pleasant and unpleasant; it has an irre- 
sistible charm. Like many pacifists, Shaw is 
not greatly shocked at prize-fighting; the way 
of the world, of course, is to regard profes- 
sional boxing as brutal, and war as noble and 
sublime, even ^^holy." 

Although, with the exception of Thomas 

1 The preceding remarks on Butler are taken by kind permis- 
sion of E. P. Button and Company, from my Introduction 
to their American edition of The Way of All Fleshy published 
in 1916. 



242 THE ADVANCE OF 

Hardy, there is no titanic figure among British 
novelists of the present moment, the number 
of professional novelists of high standing is 
nothing less than remarkable. I wonder at the 
diffusion of talent. I think I could name twen- 
ty-five English writers of the twentieth century 
whose novels have dignity and distinction, who 
are reliable — ^who can be depended on to pro- 
duce something worth reading. A large com- 
pany of literary experts have mastered the art 
of fiction, and while they do not always give us 
a good story, or construct a good plot, the pro- 
portion of success in their rapid production is 
high, and even the less notable part of their 
work is free from anything shoddy. An epit- 
ome of the general level of excellence, a fine 
representative of the whole school, is seen in 
Eden Phillpotts, of Devonshire. Without a 
single flash of genius, and with a pseudo-scien- 
tific creed that is irritating, Mr. Phillpotts 
writes three or four novels a year, every one of 
which has value — and, what is particularly sur- 
prising, every one seems deeply thought out, 
carefully wrought, full of meat. It ought to 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 243 

take him three years to write any one of these 
books, instead of three months, which is all the 
time he can apparently spare. Like his master, 
Thomas Hardy, he is a good deal of a pagan, 
though not altogether a pessimist ; and like his 
master, he has a deep, genuine vein of humour, 
which brightens his darkest tragedies, and con- 
stitutes the chief element in his most charming 
story, Widecomhe Fair, Just as in some of 
his novels, a tor, a river, or a moor is one of 
the chief characters, in this book the leading 
actor is the village. There is no hero or hero- 
ine ; we follow the fortunes of a group, and the 
author's studies of Dartmoor end on a note of 
pure comedy. One should read his preface to 
Widecomhe Fair^ and follow his advice. He 
salutes the finished work of twenty years, an- 
swers his critics, and insists on his undoubted 
right to be judged by all the Dartmoor books 
taken together, rather than by any one. In the 
work of twenty years he has tried to express his 
creed of affirmation in life, which he thinks 
chokes pessimism; if pessimism be mere acqui- 
escence, it could indeed not breathe on those 



244 THE ADVANCE OF 

heights. But the affirmation itself in these 
novels means tragedy, and a final tragic answer 
to life is not entirely removed from pessimism. 

Mr. Phillpotts is at his best when he stays in 
his corner, both in time and space ; his least suc- 
cessful books are The Lovers — a historical ro- 
mance, which seems to be directly aimed at an 
American audience, and The Joy of Youth, 
which skips blithely to Italy. Both these 
stories were published in 1913. His solid quali- 
ties as a novelist shine most conspicuously in 
The Secret Woman (1905), The Portreeve 
(1906), The Three Brothers and The Haven 
(both 1909), and The Thief of Virtue (1910). 
I think The Three Brothers is his best novel, 
and the one that shows most brilliantly his 
powers of characterisation. 

Although he bade farewell to Dartmoor in 
1913, he did not travel very far from his be- 
loved country in Brunei's Tower (1915), a 
novel full of vitality. The protagonist is a pot- 
tery, whose centripetal power draws in all the 
characters, yes, and the reader, too ; for we be- 
come as interested in the place as any of the 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 245 

workmen. The specific problem of the story is 
the struggle between evil antecedents and dog- 
like affection to a patron; this struggle takes 
place in the soul of an altogether charming boy. 
The conflict is in doubt until almost the last 
page, when the victory is won at the highest 
possible price. 

Like Eudyard Kipling, Mr. Phillpotts was 
born in India and educated in Devon. Perhaps 
his ardent love for the mists of the moors has 
been strengthened by the intolerable sunshine 
of the land of his birth. 

No man takes his art more seriously than he ; 
no man believes more profoundly in the dignity 
of the novel. When we remember that both 
Jane Austen and Henry James assumed a de- 
fensive attitude, the advance of the novel in 
the twentieth century is conspicuously shown by 
what Mr. Phillpotts wrote for the New York 
Times, 22 August, 1915: ^^The art of the novel 
embraces every sort of mental interest. . . . 
Among those who regard novel writing as man's 
work, and the noblest of arts— among those of 
fine natural endowment who approach it with 



246 THE ADVANCE OF 

sincerity and their full strength — shall be 
found the best writers of the English language 
at present living. It is not too much to say 
that contemporaries have written some of the 
best novels in our tongue, but to state this is 
not to disparage the pioneer masters. Field- 
ing and Eichardson had a different field to play 
upon, and the art has developed so enormously, 
the models from other nations have worked such 
wonders, that the novel as written in England 
and America now challenges the finest intellects 
and greatest artists of the time. The very fire 
of life glows in this art, and its possibilities are 
beyond all prediction, for fiction is the greatest 
education force in the modern world. ' ' 

The Zola t}^e of experimental novel has 
never been popular in England, as it has in 
France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Eussia; 
it is bunkered by the English conscience. Al- 
though France and England are separated by 
only twenty miles of salt-water, their traditional 
attitudes toward art are as different as though 
the two countries were on separate planets. 
Just why such intimate neighbours should show 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 247 

so tremendous a parallax in their view of art 
may be left to some one else to explain ; the fact 
is clear enough, when we remember that Guy de 
Maupassant read all his manuscripts to his 
mother, and that Alj)honse Daudet thought 
Sapho a good book for his son. The foremost 
living representative of the experimental novel 
in England is George Moore, who is not Eng- 
lish at all, but an Irishman with a French edu- 
cation, like Oscar Wilde. George Moore is a 
true disciple of Zola ; he takes realistic art very 
seriously, and solemnly announces that his chief 
recreation is religion. Wordsworth's Prelude 
seems scanty, when we remember that George 
Moore has written the history of his own life in 
five volumes; and although the latest one is 
called Valey it may be so only in a Pattian sense. 
Not one of these autobiographies is as truthful 
as Esther Waters or Evelyn Innes; conversa- 
tions with distinguished people are reported at 
great length and with much detail, conversa- 
tions that may never have occurred. And while 
Mr. Moore insists in telling us all about his 
amours, the facts in every case may be reason- 



248 THE ADVANCE OF 

ably doubted. All of these pages of alleged bio- 
graphical sensuality are really senile — ^it is like 
a weak old man licking his lips. 

Some one has said that George Moore has 
never recovered from his surprise at having 
written a really good book — Esther Waters, 
which appeared in the memorable year of 1894. 
Previously, he had produced a number of ex- 
perimental novels, that were perhaps more ex- 
periments than novels. I refer to A Modern 
Lover (1883), A Mummer's Wife (1884), 
Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher (1889). 
These books all show a certain artistic sincerity, 
a strenuous simplicity of style, without any real 
power of characterisation ; they would not have 
attracted any attention at all, were it not for 
their lubricity. No one seemed to admire the 
author, or to take him seriously. All he had ac- 
quired was notoriety, **the bastard sister of 
reputation"; and his notoriety was of a de- 
cidedly unsavoury kind. Then, with the ap- 
pearance of Esther Waters, he conquered his 
public, both in England and America. By the 
irony of fate, the book was widely advertised 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 249 

as a moral tract; manj thousand copies of a 
cheap edition were circulated with a horrible 
cover design; with a loud label to the effect that 
this novel was the ''Uncle Tom's Cabin of the 
White Slaves.'' Knowing George Moore's 
ideas as we do, this perversity of advertising 
puffery had a humour all its own. One might 
more easily imagine the late Thomas Huxley as 
a Gospel evangelist. 

The extraordinary merit of Esther Waters 
was immediately recognised by good judges. 
Like Pamela, Esther is a housemaid, who passes 
through various adventures, retaining the in- 
terest, the sympathy, and the admiration of the 
reader. It is a masterpiece in the experimen- 
tal school; there are no comments, no doctrines, 
no teachings; and there is nothing superfluous. 
I marvel at the economy of design, at the econ- 
omy of language ; it seems as if there were not 
a superfluous word in the book. Without once 
raising his voice, Mr. Moore holds our closest 
attention from first page to last. For one can- 
not read this work of fiction without believing 
that everything in it is the living truth. If one 



250 THE ADVANCE OF 

wishes to know the difference between realistic 
art and sensational daubing, one has merely to 
read the account of Derby Day in Esther 
Waters and then compare it with the rhetorical 
version in The Christian, by Hall Caine. Al- 
though I have never seen the Derby, I experi- 
enced all the pleasures of recognition in George 
Moore's account of it. 

Even if not intended by the author, Esther 
Waters has a nobly ethical tone ; the tone of sin- 
cerity and truth. No one can read it without 
admiration for its author's skill, or without 
feeling a moral stimulation. 

This extraordinary novel was a turning-point 
in the author's career. While he has not writ- 
ten anything since of quite equal value, the dif- 
ference between the novels that came after 
Esther Waters and those that preceded it, is 
the difference between an intellectually robust 
man and a morbid boy. The three novels, 
Evelyn Innes (1898), the sequel Sister Teresa 
(1901), and The Lake (1905), are all notable 
works of art; all emphatically worth reading 
and re-reading. I can see how some critics 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 251 

might regard The Lake as his best work; it has 
a subdued, a restrained power, that takes a per- 
manert place in the memory. The discussions 
of music in Evelyn Innes are immensely inter- 
esting to the amateur ; and inasmuch as Evelyn 
was a prima donna, I felt high curiosity in ask- 
ing the late Madame Nordica what she thought 
of the book. She had nothing but contempt for 
it, saying the remarks on music were of no value 
whatever, and that they revealed appalling 
ignorance. Then I asked a distinguished opera 
composer; he replied that the musical knowl- 
edge displayed was very remarkable, and that 
the discussions of music were valuable and in- 
teresting. 

For my part, having no right to an opinion 
on the merits of this question, the wonderful 
Vorspiel to Lohengrin has taken on a new sig- 
nificance for me after reading the conversation 
about it between Evelyn and the nun. 

George Moore's short stories are like a grey 
day in Ireland. One of those in Celibates was 
written apparently under the influence of Eus- 
sian naturalism. 



252 THE ADVANCE OF 

Twenty years ago, while doing some review- 
ing for a New York journal, I received a pack- 
age of new novels. The title of one of them 
caught my fancy, though I had never heard of 
the author. It was The Wheels of Chance, by 
H. G. Wells. He had been a maker of books less 
than a twelvemonth, though prophetically pro- 
lific, having published four separate volumes 
the first year of his career, 1895. It may be a 
damaging admission, but while I have a high 
respect for the ability of Mr. Wells, I have 
never enjoyed reading any one of his novels so 
much as I enjoyed The Wheels of Chance. One 
may roar with laughter at Bealhy (1915), but 
there is no more delicacy in its humour than in a 
farce-film; whereas The Wheels of Chance, de- 
scribing the bicycle adventures of Mr. Hoop- 
driver, the dry-goods clerk, has something of 
the combined mirth, pathos, and tenderness of 
Don Quixote. There is not a hint in this little 
book of Wells the Socialist, Wells the Eef ormer, 
Wells the Futurist, Wells* the Philosopher — 
there is only Wells the artist, whom I admire 
more than I do the sociological preacher. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 253 

I am quite willing to admit tliat it is the more 
pretentious "Wells who has become the world- 
figure, for a world-figure he undoubtedly is. 
Before the Great War, his books were in the 
window of every important book-shop in Ger- 
many, where he was studied rather than read. 
French and Eussian translations poured from 
the press year after year. And yet I am not at 
all sure that he has made any real contribution 
to modern thought, whereas he has made a dis- 
tinct contribution to modern literary art. He 
writes books faster than any one can read them ; 
faster than any one publisher can produce 
them, as may be seen by a reference to his bibli- 
ography. Yet as a rule his work is neither 
shallow nor trivial. 

In one respect he has never fulfilled the prom- 
ise of The Wheels of Chance. There was a 
touch of spirituality in that playful comedy, a 
flash that has since been altogether obscured by 
the cloudy sky of materialism. It seems unfor- 
tunate that when Mr. Wells has so many gifts, 
so much talent, he has not the little more, and 
how much it is ! He is a man of prose, down- 



254 THE ADVANCE OF 

right, hard-headed, matter-of-fact. One could 
hardly expect him to write like Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne, but it is a pity that he should be as far 
removed from Hawthorne as a railway time- 
table. How is it possible for a man to have so 
much humour and be so limited! Yet that kind 
comes only by prayer and fasting, words that 
have no meaning for Mr. Wells. 

Many of his stories are like a dusty road, as 
Scott ^s are like a thick forest. We reach cer- 
.tain elevations and see ahead of us nothing but 
the long brown way, in the pitiless glare of the 
sun. That was my feeling all through Ann 
Veronica. I liked Marriage much better, though 
the wilderness-cure was a large order. I liked 
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman better yet, for it 
contains an admirable commingling of the two 
authors living in the brain of Mr. Wells, the 
author of The Wheels of Chance, Kipps and 
Bealhy — and the man who wrote Ann Veronica 
and Marriage. For he is a dual personality, as 
his friend Arnold Bennett is — what a difference 
between the serious and the trivial Bennett ! 

The wife of Sir Isaac is a lovely woman, full 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 255 

of charm. She married the impossible Isaac 
because she could not be sufficiently disobliging 
to cause him the annoyance or even the incon- 
venience of a refusal. This marriage turned 
out altogether bad, worse than her soft heart's 
imaginings. Death released her; in the first 
sweets of freedom appears the *^ damned liter- 
ary man/' who, in contrast to Sir Isaac, seemed 
at first to bear healing in his wings. But 
closer inspection reveals this secretary-bird to 
be a goose, with the futile gabble and peevish 
disposition of the goose. The comedy of the 
last scene is wholly delightful. The shy, gentle 
woman, wearing the colour of freedom — black 
— shyly, gently, but decisively refuses him in 
the garden. Like a spoiled child who has been 
refused a toy, like the hero of a French novel 
who has been deprived of his mistress, the man 
of letters rushes away down the rainy garden 
path, crying, weeping, sobbing, roaring out his 
woe to the circumambient air. This is too much 
for the soft-hearted Mrs. Harman; she cannot 
bear to behold such suffering. Faint, yet pur- 
suing, she reaches the breathless hero, and we 



256 THE ADVANCE OF 

leave her as she enters slavery a second time. 
Perhaps, had she been more resolute, more 
wise — perhaps we should not love her so much. 

If the English have no sense of humour, their 
writers must furnish the exceptions that prove 
the rule. I can think of no living English nov- 
elist of distinction who is not a humourist, and 
of only one among the dead — Samuel Eichard- 
son. Hardy, De Morgan, Bennett, Wells, Phill- 
potts, Ollivant, Chesterton, Hutchinson, Lucas, 
Hawkins, Beerbohm, Locke, Merrick, Elinor 
Mordaunt — they are all humourists, each in his 
own degree and with his own special flavour. 
Nor would it be possible to deny the title alto- 
gether to John Galsworthy. 

Among contemporary men of letters, one of 
the best-beloved is William John Locke, who 
has made large additions to the gaiety of na- 
tions, and who is trying to justify two-thirds of 
his name by a considerable amount of original 
and sound philosophy. This man took the 
steep and thorny road to the heaven of literary 
fame, by graduating mathematical tripos at St. 
John's College, Cambridge. There is no doubt 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 257 

that a large proportion of successful novelists 
and dramatists have exhibited high talent in 
the study of mathematics. The constructive 
ability, the skill in original problems, very often 
bears fruit later in original literary work. The 
most conspicuous example at present is Thomas 
Hardy, whose professional training as an archi- 
tect appears in every one of his novels, giving 
them a solidity and beauty of construction en- 
tirely beyond the range of all his living con- 
temporaries. There cannot be the slightest 
doubt that Mr. Locke's honours in mathematics 
and his successful professional work as an 
architect have been of immense service in his 
brilliant career as a novelist. 

Mr. Locke has exactly what Mr. Wells has 
not— the power to make his readers love him. 
We all admire the enormous industry and the 
mental vigour of H. G. Wells— we admire these 
qualities without feeling any affection for the 
author; he is a high-power machine-gun in mod- 
ern fiction, making Hawthorne look like a muz- 
zle-loading musket. But we feel no more love 
for him than for a load of bricks. In all the 



258 THE ADVANCE OF 

novels of W. J. Locke there is pervading 
warmth of heart. In Septimus (1909), his most 
humorous book, he has, by sheer capacity for 
affection, made two heroes out of the most un- 
promising material. Sypher is a vulgar, bla- 
tant patent-medicine advertiser; he bears the 
same relation to a gentleman that a steam calli- 
ope bears to a violin. Septimus is a harmless 
nincompoop, about as aggressive as a wounded 
rabbit. Yet, by ^^ God's passionless reformers, 
influences," both these men are transformed 
into true heroes, and when we take leave of 
them, we stand uncovered. 

This novel Septimus is one of the funniest 
books of the twentieth century. It is the only 
novel of this century that I have been unable to 
read to myself in the presence of strangers. 
As a rule, no matter how comic the situations 
may be in the book you hold in your hand, if it 
be a public place, your countenance betrays 
nothing of the roaring mirth in your brain ; you 
are enjoying every word with no demonstra- 
tions. I attempted to read Septimus on the 
train, and came near to being ejected. The sud- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 259 

den surprises of the humour were so great that 
I vented prodigious cachinnations, which 
shocked me as much as they did the passengers. 
I can see those passengers, now, turning around, 
craning their necks, looking with raised eye- 
brows at their insane associate. The hours 
Septimus selected for his meals, his method of 
servant annunciation, his scheme for avoiding 
railway accidents — no one has any right to be 
so funny! 

There is a remarkable progression in Mr. 
Locke's most famous novels — a distinct pro- 
gression from paganism to Christianity. Al- 
though he had published a number of books in 
the nineteenth century, he attracted not much 
attention until 1905, when The Morals of Mar- 
cus Ordeyne appeared. Personally I cared lit- 
tle for this story — the return of Eve is vieux 
jeu, although the author has tried it once more 
in Jajfery (1915). But it was unmistakably 
the work of a literary expert, almost dazzlingly 
brilliant. It was also pagan, no hint of a Chris- 
tian point of view. It was followed the next 
year by what many regard as his masterpiece, 



260 THE ADVANCE OF 

The Beloved Vagabond — delightful, charming, 
witty — with no indication of a moral basis, the 
ethics being as footloose as the hero. Three 
years passed, and in Septimus the central 
Christian idea of sacrifice was the foundation 
of the plot. Then came Simon the Jester, a 
story analogous to Browning's Light Woman, 
which, to be sure, Mr. Hornung had already 
taken in No Hero. This novel is illumined 
with deep religious feeling, and as if to leave 
no doubt on the subject, Mr. Locke gave us 
later his sincere and beautiful Three Wise Men. 

In The Glory of Clementina Wing (1911) 
we have again Mr. Locke the ethical philosopher. 
His later books are essays of a rather different 
nature, and are not nearly so successful; the 
/Fortunate Youth is a rather pointless extrava- 
ganza, and while Jaffery is an immense im- 
provement, it cannot compare in beauty and 
charm with The Beloved Vagabond or Septimus. 

Mr. Alfred Ollivant in 1898 produced the best 
dog story ever written — Bob, Son of Battle, a 
story distinctly superior to Rab, to The Bar 
Sinister, and to The Call of the Wild. It has 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 261 

already become a classic, altliougli it has a 
thousand readers in America to a dozen in Eng- 
land. There is not a town of any size in the 
United States that does not contain ardent 
lovers of this powerful and beautiful novel ; yet 
it is very rare that one meets an Englishman 
who has even heard of it. I have never met 
one, though I have asked the question many 
times; and it was refreshing when I enquired 
of the Scot, J. M. Barrie, if he knew Oivd Boh, 
to hear him say, ^ ^ Well, rather ! ' ' 

Since the appearance of Romola, moral decay 
has been a favourite study of English novelists ; 
and although we know what Kuskin thought of 
the Decline and Fall, we do not care. For we 
know well enough the ethical value of the study 
of decadence, whether the patient be a nation 
or an individual. Browning, with all his hearty 
faith, did not hesitate to study the decay of 
love; and one of the most brilliant presenta- 
tions of this common phenomenon appears in 
an extremely clever work of fiction published 
in 1891 by Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Love Letters 
of a Worldly Woman; which has for its text, 



262 THE ADVANCE OF 

a citation from One Word More — ^^ Wherefore? 
Heaven ^s gift takes earth's abatement.'' This 
book follows Richardson's example in every- 
thing but length, being cast in the form of let- 
ters. There is a delicate psychological analy- 
sis here that one cannot read without mental 
pleasure. Mrs. Clifford has produced many 
works since then, and I hope she will write many 
more. But she has never done anything quite 
equal in artistic precision to that tiny, early 
masterpiece. 

Miss Cholmondeley, with her sombre talent, 
ought to write something in this vein better 
than she has thus far succeeded in accomplish- 
ing. While reading Red Pottage and especially 
Prisoners, I am conscious of a tremendous la- 
tent power that does not reach the printed page. 
Is her difficulty merely one of articulation? 

Two brilliant studies of moral decay in the 
individual may be seen in two recent novels : I 
refer to In Cotton Wool (1912) by W. B. Max- 
well, and to Tributaries (1914) (American 
title. The House of Deceit), by an English 
author who wishes to remain anonymous. In 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 263 

Cotton Wool has a sloping descent that makes 
the first chapter and the last as different as the 
Lilliputians and the Yahoos; its purpose is 
purely ethical, its art absolutely sincere. The 
line of least resistance leads to hell. In Tribu- 
taries, we have another melancholy but ethi- 
cally valuable picture of slow and subtle moral 
deterioration. The hero 's course is not straight 
down, but in spirals ; he rises a little after each 
relapse, only to sink deeper on the next slide, 
and eventually to become an incurable case — a 
lost soul. 

The level of the work of Leonard Merrick is 
high, but it would have been better for his fame 
had he written ten worthless books and one mas- 
terpiece. He is a novelist of real distinction, 
incapable of producing sensational, cheap, 
superficial, or stodgy books. The oft-quoted 
bull exactly fits his work: although he seldom 
rises above his average, he never falls below it. 
Any one of his novels may be safely recom- 
mended to beguile the tedium of a railway jour- 
ney; railway travel is generally as disagreeable 
as an operation, and one should always take an 



264 THE ADVANCE OF 

anaesthetic. With a good novel, the patient 
reaches his destination unaware of the jolts 
and stops that punctuated progress. 

There is a shocking sincerity in the work of 
H. H. Bashf ord that ought to carry him far on 
the road toward permanent fame. In The Pil- 
grims^ March, we have scenes that find their 
only counterpart in Fanny's First Play. In a 
more powerful, and much more disagreeable 
story, Pity the Poor Blind, we have a picture 
of life in an English country house that I ar- 
dently hope is untrue. The study of the self- 
deceived clergyman converted by a perfectly 
rudimentary and perfectly healthy female, is 
not easy to forget. Perhaps the most original 
character in the story is the little sister. In 
the course of my adventures in fiction, I have 
met many limbs of Satan, in the perfect dis- 
guise of innocent girlhood. Yet never anything 
to compare with this creature. She is not an 
enfant terrible; she is a child of hell. 

Delightful it is to turn from the sulphurous 
laughter of Mr. Bashford to the wholesome out- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 265 

door heartiness of Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson. 
In The Happy Warrior (1912), he created the 
most irresistibly winsome boy that I have ever 
met, in or out of books — ^'Did you say GetapT' 
Like Mercutio, he was too good to last — the 
author had to kill him. Yet the death of Mer- 
cutio is a vital factor in the plot of Shake- 
speare's tragedy, whereas there was no neces- 
sity for the death of our young warrior. In A 
Clean Heart (1914), we have the very extremes 
of emotion. No one whose nerves are askew 
should read the first third of the book; it is a 
terrible picture of mental obsession becoming 
madness. I thought I was going to lose my 
mind. The scene changes from the horror of 
insanity to such outrageous mirth, horse-play, 
buffoonery, that one forgets approaching mad- 
ness and holds one's sides in a veritable agony 
of laughter. The egoist learns Christianity 
first from a roaring drunkard and then from an 
ignorant girl; learns the truth only by the sacri- 
fice of two persons perhaps more valuable than 
he. This is a deeply religious book; illustrat- 



266 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ing with striking power the Scriptural text that 
supplies the title. Mr. Hutchinson bids fair to 
be a vital force in modern fiction. 

Mr. St. John Ervine, the Irish dramatist, 
published in 1914 a sombre and depressing 
novel called Mrs. Martin's Man — not by any 
means a wholly successful book, but truly 
original, quite out of the ordinary and conven- 
tional rut. His next story, Alice and a Family, 
is one of the most charming, enliveningly hu- 
morous character-sketches of our time. The 
dialogue has a steady brilliance that is aston- 
ishing ; no lapses from beginning to end. It is 
a story of the London slums exactly as The 
Rosie World is a story of the New York slums. 
And the resemblance is carried much further, 
for in each instance it is a little girl who pulls 
the strings. If each family in the world had 
either a Eosie or an Alice, the millennium would 
materialise. 



CHAPTER X 

TWENTIETH CENTUKY AMERICAN NOVELISTS 

The leading contemporary Americans — Losses by death 
and depreciation — James Lane Allen — Charles Stewart — 
H. K. Viele — Henry Harland — Owen Wister — Winston 
Churchill — Art and politics — Booth Tarkington — The In- 
diana School — Jack London — Robert Herrick — H. S. Harri- 
son — Gertrude Atherton — Mary Wilkins — Edith Wharton — 
Dorothy Canfield — ^Anne Sedgwick. 

Some Americans of promise have been defeated 
by death ; others have been beaten by their own 
past. A conspicuous example of the first class 
is Frank Norris; of the second, James Lane 
Allen. No matter what one's ambition may be 
— poetry, engineering, social prestige, dancing, 
tennis — there are plenty of active and merciless 
competitors; but the most active and the most 
merciless is one's own self. The history of 
athletics is the tragedy of the athlete trying to 
keep up with himself, and invariably being 
beaten. The biography of nearly every profes- 
sional baseball player is the melancholy circle — 

267 



2*68 THE ADVANCE OF 

from oblivion to the minor league to tlie major 
league to the minor league to oblivion. He 
completes this orbit in about the time it takes 
Jupiter to go once around the sun. But the 
path of the literary man ought to be as the shin- 
ing light, that shineth more and more unto the 
perfect day. Seldom is this the case. Black- 
more wrote Lorna Doone, and spent thirty 
strenuous years in a losing race with himself. 
Kipling, in the prime of life, cannot recapture 
the first, fine, careless rapture — and how earn- 
estly he tries ; with what bulldog determination ! 
To produce one work of genius is perhaps 
enough for a lifetime ; and yet there must be the 
very passion of failure in the realisation that 
one cannot equal one's past mental achieve- 
ments. Many authors know in their own hearts 
what Swift meant when, turning over the pages 
of A Tale of a Tub, he cried out, *^Good God, 
what a genius I had when I wrote that book ! ' ' 
When The Choir Invisible appeared in 1897 
it received both in England and in America the 
acclaim it richly deserved. Since that time Mr. 
Allen has been led astray from the fields of art 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 269 

by some kind of portentous philosophy. Even 
a good creed will often wreck an artist; but 
when the light that is in him is darkness, how 
great is that darkness! To see how far from 
truth and nature a philosophical scheme will 
drag a really intelligent writer, one has only to 
read The Bride of the Mistletoe (1909). This 
story is not meant to be a ^^gramercy" book; 
it is not intended to be a high-flown historical 
romance. No, it describes a modern college 
professor's conversations with his wife; and 
they have been married a goodly number of 
years. Now when a man and a woman have 
been married ten years, they know each other 
rather well; whatever the mask worn in public, 
however successful the man may be in the 
rhetorical deceit of strangers, at home there is 
a person on whom this kind of thing won't work. 
Yet this is the way Mr. Allen's college professor 
talks to his own wife; -talks to her when they 
are alone, without a gallery : 

*' Josephine, sometimes while looking out of 
the study window a spring morning, I have 
watched you strolling among the flowers of the 



270 THE ADVANCE OF 

lawn. I have seen you linger near a honey- 
suckle in full bloom and question the blossoms 
in your questioning way — you who are always 
wishing to probe to the heart of things, to drain 
out of them the red drop of their significance. 
But, grey-eyed querist of actuality, those fra- 
grant trumpets could blow to your ear no mes- 
sage about their origin. ' ' 

>^Now what would happen to a man in the 
twentieth century who should address his wife 
(when no one else was around) as **grey-eyed 
querist of actuality"? She would either burst 
into irrepressible laughter or, after an anx- 
ious scrutiny, she would take his tempera- 
ture. 

If this book were the work of some gushing 
girl — but it isn't; it was written by a trained 
novelist of distinction, a man who has honestly 
earned fame by a notable story. Yet to those 
who are wondering what is the matter with Mr. 
Allen, The Bride of the Mistletoe is instructive 
and explanatory. To me such rhodomontade in 
a novel is as unpleasant as sanctimonious cant, 
or the bunkum we hear from those ^^friends of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 271 

the workingman," the candidates for political 
office. 

The American novelist most worthy to fill the 
particular vacancy caused by the death of Mark 
Twain is Charles D. Stewart. His literary pro- 
duction is varied, both in subject-matter and in 
excellence ; and he has written two novels that 
are genuine studies of American life, informed 
with rich humouT— The Fugitive Blacksmith 
(1905) and Partners of Providence (1907). In 
the former, the story of the man left alone with 
the sheep and driven mad by the stars is art of 
high sincerity. 'In the latter, there are two 
leading characters, the Mississippi and the Mis- 
souri. These mighty rivers become mighty per- 
sonalities. This is the book that in vividness of 
description, accurate reporting, lively imagina- 
tion, and roaring mirth infallibly reminds the 
reader of Mark Twain. 

The death of Herman Knickerbocker Viele in 
1908 robbed American literature of a brilhant 
novelist. His Last of the Knickerbockers con- 
tains pictures of a New York boarding-house 
worthy of Balzac; it is a novel combining 



272 THE ADVANCE OF 

realism, wit and tenderness with a certain deli- 
cacy of touch rare on this side of the ocean. 
His other story, The Inn of the Silver Moon 
(1900), has a grace, humour, and charm worthy 
of the French scene where it is laid. It seems 
strange that work of such distinction did not at- 
tract more general attention; but Mr. Viele 
would surely have received adequate recogni- 
tion if he had lived longer. 

The late Henry Harland made an artistic mis- 
take in turning from tragedy to comedy, from 
the slums of New York to the beauty of the 
Italian lakes. Financially it was a profitable 
speculation ; for one reader of As It Was Writ- 
ten there were a hundred of The CardinaVs 
Snuff Box, His later manner was as agreeable 
as rich food and sparkling wine ; his books were 
eagerly devoured and speedily forgotten. But 
some of us can still remember the thrill in read- 
ing that story of double personality where the 
lover stabbed his betrothed in the night, and was 
overwhelmed with horror and amazement to 
find her body in the morning. ** Sydney 
Luska" was a more impressive writer than 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 273 

Henry Harland — and it was a pity tliat lie 
joined the marshmallow school. 

Owen Wister, in The Virginian, succeeded in 
accomplishing a difficult task. He produced a 
^*best seller'' that continues to sell. This ad- 
mirable novel was the American literary sensa- 
tion of the year 1902, and unlike most sensa- 
tions, has not been forgotten. Had the vfork 
contained more unity, had the different episodes 
been more skilfully welded, we might have seen 
a classic. As it is we have one of the best works 
of American fiction of the twentieth century, 
incomparably better than anything else its au- 
thor has achieved, though his other books — 
especially Philosophy Four — are not without 
distinction. 

Mr. Winston Churchill produced Richard 
Carvel in 1899, and his steady production of 
' ^ C " novels that have followed at regular inter- 
vals has been one continuous stream of popu- 
lar success. He is far more a representative of 
modern American literature than he is a leader 
of it; for he is surely as remarkable for his 
limitations as for his virtues. He has learned 



274 THE ADVANCE OF 

how to write novels by writing them ; he has be- 
come a finished expert. The crudities of his 
earlier work have been ironed out; he reports 
the salient features of American social, political 
and religious life. His characters are chosen, 
not created; they are chosen to represent the 
ideas that Mr. Churchill wishes to convey 
to his readers. An honest and high-minded 
man, with the unmistakable temperament of a 
reformer, Mr. Churchill seems to feel the re- 
sponsibility of his popularity. As he sits down 
at his desk to begin a new novel, he has the com- 
forting and also terrifying assurance that five 
hundred thousand people will read and discuss 
the sentences he writes in solitude. He must do 
something to improve the world. Thus his 
novels are becoming more and more didactic. 
His finest work is seen in Coniston (1906), and 
even there he is more ** progressive" than ar- 
tistic. In the Inside of the Cup (1913) he de- 
voutly, reverently, and energetically attacked 
the modern church; in A Far Country (1915), 
which comes dangerously near the limbo of 
tedium, he attacked the modern conditions of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 275 

commercial life. If he does not change his 
tactics he may share the fate of Mrs. Humphry 
Ward, whose so-called novels have sunk under 
an accumulation of excess baggage. She has 
too much freight for the engine. Mr. 
ChurchilPs literary style lacks distinction; his 
characters have little vitahty; his pages are 
lacking in humour and charm. But his books 
are discussions of subjects that interest the pub- 
lic at the moment when they appear; and they 
are an accurate mirror of public sentiment. 
The historian of the future could obtain a pretty 
good idea of ''the state of the public mind" 
from 1900 to 1915 by reading them. 

Strange and sad that he should have political 
ambition — wish to be a member of the legisla- 
ture — aspire to success as a public speaker. 
America is in no need of politicians or of ora- 
tors ; what America needs is artists. It is more 
important that we should produce a great novel- 
ist, a great musician, a great poet, a great 
painter than it is for any one to be elected presi- 
dent. We can get along with any kind of a 
president; we have to; but we cannot get along 



276 THE ADVANCE OF 

without artists. Men of letters and great ar- 
tists are the lights of a nation; they are what 
make it great; they are what give it a place in 
history. Those who love their country ought 
to rejoice more at the appearance of an original 
literary genius than at any amount of battle- 
ships or any number of *' bumper'' crops. Art 
is more important than politics, because it is 
concerned solely with those things that are eter- 
nal. One day John Morley met Dante Gabriel 
Eossetti walking on the street; it was the very 
day when a general election was in progress. 
To the consternation of Mr. Morley, Eossetti 
had not only failed to vote, but he was unaware 
that an election was going on. Finally Eossetti 
said, **Well, I suppose one side or the other will 
get in, and I don't suppose it makes much dif- 
ference which, ' ' — and Mr. Morley now says that 
although he was greatly shocked at the time, he 
cannot for the life of him remember which did 
get in, seeming to prove that Eossetti was right. 
When Napoleon was trampling Germany under 
foot, Goethe went right along producing novels, 
lyrics, dramas ; and time has proved the correct- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 277 

ness of his judgment. He could not take his 
mind off really important things for the sake 
of what was transitory. 

Mr. Churchill has decided literary gifts. He 
can do much more for America by cultivating 
them than by joining the vast army of political 
workers. 

Booth Tarkington has exactly what Winston 
Churchill has not — humour, charm, lightness of 
touch, a certain winsomeness of style as perva- 
sive as sunshine. The difference between the 
two men is immediately apparent when we com- 
pare Mr. Crewe's Career with The Gentleman 
from Indiana. If we could make an amalgam 
out of Churchill, Tarkington, Harrison, Herrick, 
and Jack London, we should have a great Amer- 
ican novelist; and every man of the five would 
make a distinct and valuable contribution to the 
fusion. Richard Carvel and The Gentleman 
from Indiana were published the same year, 
1899, one a historical romance, in the correct 
fashion of the moment, the other a realistic por- 
trayal of journalistic and political life in a small 
town. Since that date these two popular 



278 THE ADVANCE OF 

favourites have written side by side, uncon- 
sciously inviting comparative criticism. In 
choosing between them the public has taken 
both. 

Such novels as The Conquest of Canaan 
(1905) and The Guest of Quesnay (1908) are 
good stories well told, without any other signi- 
ficance and without any permanent value. It 
is rather interesting that in the year 1915 our 
two novelists should each have produced a book 
that is intended to be, and is, an indictment of 
modern American conditions in the commercial 
life of big cities. Now there is surely more hu- 
manity in The Turmoil than in A Far Country, 
The hero of the latter novel is a mechanism 
merely, a representative of the evil tendencies 
condemned by the author ; whereas in The Tur- 
moil, both father and son are real persons, full 
of individuality. This story is a skilful accu- 
sation of the American love of bigness, with its 
concomitant evils of smoke, dirt, noise, especi- 
ally noise. The son is as unlike his father as the 
sons of rich Americans are likely to be : in the 
end the enormous distance between them is 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 279 

spanned by the longest bridge in the universe — 
love. The son is so much like the author of the 
novel that we hope his apparent surrender to 
big business at the end does not mean the sur- 
render of Mr. Tarkington to the demands of the 
reading public. Four or five years ago I feared 
that the brilliant gifts of this Hoosier were going 
to be degraded to the production of the girl- 
model of the year — he is much too able a writer 
to become a caterer and to fall under the temp- 
tation of immediate success. As the German 
dramatist remarked when he wrote his first play 
full of high ideals, *^The public is a Hydra"; 
but when he found that the way to quick returns 
was to please the public, he said cynically, *^The 
public is not a Hydra ; it is a milch cow. ' ' Many 
of our novelists have discovered this truth ; the 
author gets from such a public rich payment 
and bovine appreciation; as the cow chews its 
cud in perfect contentment, so the healthy young 
girls chew their gum as they turn the pages in 
sweet delight. 

The Turmoil is the most ambitious and on the 
whole the best of Mr. Tarkington 's novels ; with- 



280 THE ADVANCE OF 

out too much didacticism, it is an unsparing and 
honest diagnosis of the great American disease. 
Its author has proved that he can write a novel 
full of cerebration without losing any of his 
charm. In spite of that delightful miniature 
historical romance, Monsieur Beaucaire, Mr. 
Tarkington is a realist ; he hates pretence, sham, 
cant in just the way a typical "undergraduate 
hates them ; perhaps if he did not hate them so 
much, perhaps if his sense of humour were not 
such a conservative force in his nature, he might 
attain to even higher ground. In his study of 
the American boy, Penrod, we see his shrewd 
knowledge of life and his original mirth-sense. 
The first half of the book is second-rate; it 
seems like a copy of some original ; but the sec- 
ond half is wonderful, with its feeling for re- 
ality as against cant ; and those two nigger-boys 
are worthy of Mark Twain at his best. The 
sense of fact is the dominant quality in Booth 
Tarkington, as it was in Mark Twain. It ac- 
counts for his artistic virtues, and for his lack 
of range. But The Turmoil proves that he is 
growing in spiritual grace. 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 281 

Every man and woman over fifty onglit to 
read Seventeen. It is not only a skilful analysis 
of adolescent love, it is, with all its side-splitting 
mirth, a tragedy. No mature person who reads 
this novel will ever seriously regret his *4ost 
youth'' or wish he were young again. 

Perhaps it is natural that New York news- 
papers should have their jest at the expense of 
the so-called ''Indiana School/' For my part, 
I have for this group of writers only wonder 
and praise ; wonder, that in the particular State 
of Indiana — why not in Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, 
or Missouri? — a group of authors should ap- 
pear, each of whom has an individual excel- 
lence ; praise, because their actual m.erit, as com- 
pared with average American production, is so 
high. Edward Eggleston, Maurice Thompson, 
Lew Wallace, James Whitcomb Riley, Booth 
Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, George Ade — 
these are all justly honoured names. And un- 
like as their personalities are, their work has 
one common distinguishing mark, literary hon- 
esty. Edward Eggleston 's Hoosier School 
Master (1871) is a truthful picture of life, with 



282 THE ADVANCE OF 

scenes and characters of extraordinary vitality. 
I have not read the book for forty years, but at 
this moment I can see the schoolmaster taking 
off his coat to fight the husky Bud Means, and 
the general surprise at the spelling-match when 
the teacher was selected instead of the local 
champion — wasn't his name Jeems Phillips! 
Nor shall I forget my delight when I picked up, 
fresh from the press, a copy of Fables in Slang, 
and wondered who the author was, w^hether or 
not George Ade was his real name, and if so, 
how it was pronounced! Those Fables are 
acute criticisms of American life. I venture to 
say that entirely apart from their humour, they 
constitute a more valuable handbook for fathers 
and mothers who are worried about their chil- 
dren — and what ones are not 1 — than any of the 
common moral treatises on the subject. I feel 
sure that these Fables would be better for 
school-teachers to study than many of the works 
on pedagogy. 

The flannel-shirted novelist, Jack London, has 
never written anything nearly so good as his 
Call of the Wild (1903), though the early chap- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 283 

ters of The Sea Wolf (1904) are brilliantly exe- 
cuted. When I began to read that story, the 
scenes at the start, the tumbling into the icy 
waters of the bay, the helplessness of the critic 
of Poe's literary style in the presence of the 
Wolf, I thought I was at last reading the great 
American novel — ^but when I came to the love 
scenes and the seal scenes, then I knew I was 
not. During the great and fleeting popularity 
of the ^' red-blood '^ school, an intense love of 
which is a sure indication of effeminacy. Jack 
London stood high in favour. Such phrases as 
*'red corpuscles'' (whatever that may mean), 
**male ardour,'' *^ sheer brutality," were quite 
in fashion ; indeed they were the dying kicks of 
a pseudo-romanticism — instead of being a sign 
of vitality, they were evidences of the last con- 
vulsion. To read a book like White Fang is to 
feel like a cannibal, crunching bones and bolting 
blood. Yet Jack London is a man of letters; 
he has the true gift of style, so rare and so un- 
mistakable; if he would forget his social and 
political creed, and lower his voice, he might 
achieve another masterr>iece. Meanwhile let us 



284 THE ADVANCE OF 

be grateful for The Call of the Wild, a story that 
no other man could have written. 

Is there a living writer more unlike Jack Lon- 
don than Eobert Herrick? One born at San 
Francisco, the other at Cambridge — one a tramp 
by instinct and choice, the other a Harvard 
graduate and college professor. The last thing 
to say of Mr. Herrick's art would be that it 
lacked virility ; but its virility is never forced on 
the reader, just as its author never shouts in 
public. His strength is a subdued strength; 
the virtues of his literary style are quiet; his 
literary attitude is ironical — of which the ad- 
vertisement of fire-proof construction in the 
midst of the devouring flames is an excellent 
illustration. I sometimes think the best thing 
he has written is the short story called The Pro- 
fessor^ s Opportunity. It is a work of pes- 
simism, a remorseless study of the sordid side 
of academical life, of the meanness of teaching, 
of the relations between the Assistant Profes- 
sor who cannot live, on his salary and the college 
President who is a liar — not a natural liar, but 
made perfect in deceit through the exigencies of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 285 

his office. The picture is not a pleasant one, 
and the emphasis is harsh, but those who read 
Mr. Herrick's novels for pleasure are bound to 
be disappointed. Wormwood, wormwood. 

Every author has a right to surprise us by 
producing something ^ ^ different ' ' ; but what did 
Mr. Herrick mean by writing His Great Adven- 
ture? This is a work worthy of the late Mrs. 
E. D. E. N. Southworth. 

Of all American authors who have made their 
debut in the twentieth century, I regard Mr. 
Henry Sydnor Harrison as the most promising. 
In January, 1911, no one had ever heard of 
him ; by December everybody was talking about 
him. One novel, Queed, made the difference 
between obscurity and fame. I think Queed 
deserved all its success. It is a real novel, with 
a real plot, and real characters. The construc- 
tion, the weakest point in most contemporary 
works of fiction, is particularly brilliant; from 
the first to the final bark of the pleasure-dog 
the story develops with naturalness. The only 
thing that seems like artifice is the too patent 
opposition of the clever young politician and the 



286 THE ADVANCE OF 

despised pedant ; one increases in exact propor- 
tion to the other 's decrease, so that at a certain 
moment they pass each other. But the hero is 
quite original in modern fiction, as original as 
Browning's Grammarian in poetry; all readers 
are stimulated by his spiritual advance. 

The next book, F. V/s Eyes (1913), despite its 
unpromising title, indicated no falling off. The 
conquest of a woman of the world by a Chris- 
tian hero is not unknown in fiction, and was a 
favourite device in the novels of Dostoevski ; it 
has been recently tried with success by Anne 
Sedgwick in The Encounter; its piquancy 
seemed to be felt by Bernard Shaw in Androcles 
and the Lion. The contrast has every dramatic 
possibility, and they are made the most of by 
Mr. Harrison. But apart from the main theme, 
this novel abounds in scenes of the liveliest hu- 
mour and charm ; scenes equalled for their truth 
in humorous details only by William De Mor- 
gan. Yet the real power of the book lies in 
its artistic handling of a great driving moral 
idea — the idea of Christian unselfishness, of 
the old paradox of saving one's life by losing 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 287 

it. The way in which countless little details are 
accumulated, every one of which aids in the de- 
velopment of the central thought of the book, 
is worthy of high praise. Mr. Harrison is 
something more than a clever novelist; he is a 
valuable ally of the angels. 

His third novel, AngeWs Business (1915), is 
distinctly inferior to its predecessors; inferior 
in construction, in characterisation, in human 
interest. It is too timely to wear the marks of 
permanence ; and it completely lacks the fresh- 
ness, the spontaneous charm of Queed. That 
novel was written apparently because the au- 
thor could not hold on to it any longer ; in writ- 
ing it, he simply released something from his 
soul. Now, AngeWs Business is the work of a 
professional novelist, from whom a new book is 
due; he selects his subject, and proceeds to 
cover white paper. There are, however, two 
notable features of this story which make me 
glad it was published ; first, the leading lady is 
not the heroine. Angela deceives not only her 
family, her acquaintances, but what is much 
more difficult, she deceives the reader. Of 



288 THE ADVANCE OF 

course it is a favourite device of Mr. Harrison 
to present a character to his readers with a 
complimentary introduction, only to have the 
stuff depreciate on our hands; there is no sud- 
den shock of disappointment or amazement, 
there is simply the slow change in our attitude 
from admiration to contempt — caused by a 
thousand details rather than by one catastrophe 
as in typical melodrama. The transformation 
is accomplished in a consummate manner. 
After reading the first chapter, no one would be- 
lieve that this girl would or could develop as 
she does ; yet at the end of the book both natural 
and moral values are correct. 

The woman question — which no man can es- 
cape nowadays — is from one point of view 
finally disposed of here ; which makes me regard 
Angela's Business as the best contribution to 
the whole question of feminism that I have seen 
in any work of fiction. It is much easier to 
write about woman than about woman-suffrage 
— that is, easier for a poet or a novelist; for 
woman-suffrage is not naturally malleable for 
purposes of art, while woman is and always has 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 289 

been an ideal subject. Mr. Harrison settles the 
question not from the point of view of feminism, 
but femininity; he proves to us that *^ womanly'' 
women are so, not because of their occupation 
or because of their opinions, but because of 
themselves. An ardent suffragette may be full 
of delicate charm; and a frivolous woman may 
lack every vestige of attractive force. This 
ought to be axiomatic, but is not; Mr. Harri- 
son's solution of the problem is not only the 
only correct one, but one that pros and antis 
should study with attention. As to whether or 
not women should have the ballot, Mr. Harrison 
leaves that question where he found it. His 
moral is that women need not fear to have opin- 
ions because of the danger of losing their charm 
— since many have neither opinions nor charm. 

I have not read any book by Mr. Harrison 
without immediately wishing for another. He 
has won already an enviable place in contem- 
porary literature, and of all our young writers, 
he seems to have the largest natural endow- 
ment. 

Of our American woman novelists, Gertrude 



290 THE ADVANCE OF 

Atlierton and Mary Wilkins (Freeman) have 
been before the public for about a quarter of a 
century, and we know something of their range, 
force, and quality. Mary Wilkins has shown 
better judgment than Mrs. Atherton in sticking 
closely to a certain field; narrowing her scope, 
while gaining in intensity. If one picks out 
almost at random from Mrs. Atherton 's long 
list of publications Senator North (1900), The 
Conqueror (1902) and Tower of Ivory (1910), 
one sees at a glance the almost impossible space 
that this interesting and ambitious writer has 
attempted to cover. Her personality is more 
interesting than her novels; I find her *Wiews'' 
and her pungent letters to the newspapers more 
exciting reading than her formal works. She 
would perhaps make a deeper impression on 
contemporary literature if her novels hit the 
same mark more often, if she were identified in 
the public mind with some particular literary 
manner, some artistic point of view — consider 
the success of Eden Phillpotts, without mem- 
tioning an original genius like Thomas Hardy! 
Nor can I agree with Mrs. Atherton in her 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 291 

spirited attacks on Mr. Howells and the Ameri- 
can novel in general; for surely there is more 
actual truth in The Rise of Silas LapJiam than 
in Tower of Ivory. 

Many years ago I was invited to a literary 
^^tea'' in Boston, which confirmed my worst 
fears. Fourth and fifth class writers were 
present, each surrounded by satellites; other 
persons, of more ambition than capacity and 
more conceit than either, appeared in strange 
garments and talked in accents not of this world 
— one young man, I remember, wore a Greek 
gown! As George Moore would say, all that 
an ordinary man could do on beholding such a 
spectacle would be to shout Great God! and 
leave for some human destination. I was about 
to do this, when I saw in a corner a quiet, nor- 
mal young woman, who was talking with a na- 
tural expression on her face. I enquired, and 
was told, '^Oh, that's Mary Wilkins,'' as though 
she were the janitress. It was indeed Mary 
Wilkins; incomparably the most distinguished 
person in the room, looking as true to life as one 
of her New England characters. 



292 THE ADVANCE OF 

Every line in the books of Miss Wilkins reads 
as though it had come out of the author's actual 
experience. She is primarily truthful, and 
never prepares an artificial effect — ^never sacri- 
fices reality for sensation. Her novels are his- 
tories; histories of New England localities and 
of New England people. Such books as Pem- 
hroJce (1894), The Portion of Labor (1901), and 
The Shoulders of Atlas (1908) are uncompro- 
misingly faithful to fact. The last-named is 
indeed an experimental novel in the manner of 
Zola; just as honest, just as conscientious, just 
as unflinching as he. Only, while she rejDre- 
sents the filth and sordidness of poverty, she 
also represents the love that dignifies and en- 
nobles it. Religious aspiration and family love 
are exactly as ^*true to life" as the dirt on a 
man^s boots — just as the unspeakable affection 
that exists between a man and a woman who 
have been married forty years, strengthened 
every day by the sight of each other's grey 
hairs, is as much of a fact as the animal passion 
that draws together young lovers. One cannot 
emphasise too strongly just now that a picture 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 293 

of life which is all sordidness is not a true pic- 
ture; Gorki, for example, represents workers 
coming out of a factory with only one expres- 
sion on every face, the sodden despair of hope- 
less weariness. But if one will stand at the 
gates of any factory in the world when the 
workers are released, he will see that Gorki is 
not telling the truth; they do not all have that 
expression, or look that way. There is plenty 
of misery in evidence ; but many of the men and 
women act like boys and girls just let out of 
school; they are laughing, joking, and full of 
mirth. I request any fair-minded critic to 
read Gorki's Mother and Miss Wilkins's The 
Shoulders of Atlas consecutively, and then to 
declare which of the two novels is more true to 
humanity and to the facts of human existence. 

At this moment Edith Wharton stands by 
common consent at the head of all living Amer- 
ican women who write books; indeed there are 
many who say she is our foremost novelist. 
From this decision, handed down constantly in 
our magazines and reviews, I find myself forced 
to dissent. She has produced only one master- 



294 THE ADVANCE OF 

piece, Ethan Frome (1911), giving only one 
aspect of country life, bnt presenting that in a 
wonderful technique. Yet even in this story I 
am unconvinced, for I am certain that the lov- 
ers never would have taken that coast to perdi- 
tion ; in real life they would have thought about 
it, as we all think of jumping off high places — 
without actually jumping. The story is, how- 
ever, a grey masterpiece, a little group of mis- 
erable people living forever under a gunmetal 
sky. 

Although The Valley of Decision (1902) at- 
tracted considerable attention, it was not until 
the appearance of The House of Mirth (1905) 
that Mrs. Wharton's popularity became general. 
Unlike most of her stories, no unusual intel- 
ligence is required to understand or to appre- 
ciate The House of Mirth; and no unusual in- 
telligence was required to write it. A tale of 
exaggerated intensity, ending in melodrama. 
The two books that followed in 1907, Madame 
de Treymes and The Fruit of the Tree, illus- 
trate the author's versatility; the former has 
great dignity, the latter none whatever. In- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 295 

deed The Fruit of the Tree is a failure, both 
artistically and morally ; we are evidently meant 
to sympathise with the second wife, which is 
impossible, because she is a murderer. I do 
not refer to her overt act of murder when Bessy 
was helpless, for there it is possible to admire 
her courage in taking the responsibility; no, I 
mean her reference to the wild horse in Bessy's 
presence; the moment she mentions that dan- 
gerous beast, she is guilty of murder. 

Next to Ethan Frome, I think Mrs. "Wharton's 
best novel is The Reef (1912) ; it has an excel- 
lent plot, and what is rare in her books, none of 
the characters is overdrawn. As for The Cus- 
tom of the Country (1914), as a work of satire it 
is powerful, though immensely exaggerated; 
and the scorn exhibited for American social 
ideals and American social life shows exceed- 
ing bitterness. Mrs. Wharton is a good hater ; 
if her sense of humour and her powers of hu- 
man sympathy were developed in like measure 
with her capacity for hate, disgust, and irony, 
what a novelist she would be ! She has all the 
intellectual gifts, all the purely mental endow- 



296 THE ADVANCE OF 

ment, without any spiritual force ; there is from 
the first page to the last of all her novels that 
I have read no whisper of divine influence; 
positively no recognition of anything unseen 
and eternal; she knows you not, ye heavenly 
powers! I am not scolding her for this, I am 
merely mentioning it. Suppose she had even a 
touch of the spirituality and loving sympathy 
of Dostoevski, what a difference it would make 
in the manner of her work! Her range is lim- 
ited by the boundaries of this world. 

Apart from that vital loss in all her work, I 
find The Custom of the Country too overdrawn 
to be either a good novel or a really effective 
satire. If her purpose was to contrast Ameri- 
can with foreign sentiment, one has only to re- 
member Henry James's A^nerican, where the 
same task is accomplished in a more powerful 
way. After finishing The Custom of the Coun- 
try, one really ought to read The American; I 
am sure that the contrast would be instruc- 
tive. 

Anne Sedgwick (Mrs. de Selincourt) is a 
novelist who is attracting more thoughtful at- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 297 

tention every year, and of whom Americans are 
becoming increasingly proud. She has had 
only one popular success, Tante (1911), a novel 
of strong dramatic quality, but decidedly in- 
ferior to A Fountain Sealed (1907). The two 
books have one thing in common, disillusion. 
What makes this writer so fond of the study of 
vampires? Tante is an artistic vampire; the 
young philanthropist is a moral vampire. 
What power of selfishness is displayed, what 
cruelty, what misconception of one's place in 
the universe ! And what calm, intellectual joy 
Miss Sedgwick takes in very gradually stripping 
these goddesses ! Where did she learn this par- 
ticular art? who taught her such a lesson of 
bitterness ? 

In her novel The Encounter (1914) we have 
the philosopher Nietzsche as one of the leading 
characters. This extraordinary book has an 
absolutely negligible plot, almost no plot at all — 
indeed it is not a story, it is a problem. And 
the interest of the problem lies not at all in the 
incidents or in the course of events, but in the 
clash of character on character — really in the 



298 THE ADVANCE OF 

clash of moral ideals. Only the other day a 
clever American woman was asked what stand 
she took on the American sale-of -munitions to 
the Allies; and she replied sadly, ^'I don^t know 
where I stand on any question." There are 
times when all the great questions of life seem 
to leave honest persons in mere bewilderment; 
happy are those who have no trouble in making 
up their minds ! The various kinds of AnscJiau- 
ungen are illustrated in The Encounter by pow- 
erful personalities, whom the young girl actu- 
ally encounters. Indeed, there are six char- 
acters in this story, every one of whom is going 
to impress the reader— impress him so deeply 
that he only half -misses the real absence of nar- 
rative. These are the young American girl 
herself, whose mind has already received so 
many impressions that it is just possible she 
may be interested by a new one, but not possible 
that any new one could produce shock; her 
mother, a quite new person in modern fiction, 
and yet strikingly real, with enormous power 
of observation veiled by a mask of sleepy in- 
difference — one feels sure that no individual has 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 299 

ever penetrated to the quiet depths of this wo- 
man's soul; then there is the sentimental Italian 
devotee; Nietzsche himself, who is thought to 
be a superman, but who is really a great baby ; 
Graf von Liidenstein, with no philosophy except 
sensuality, knowing exactly what he wants, and 
without scruples, no Superman, but certainly a 
dangerous Subman ; much more apt to live up to 
his desires than Christians are to live up to 
their principles, or philosophers to their ideals ; 
and finally the cripple, Conrad Sachs, who rep- 
resents without one word of cant, a living Chris- 
tian faith translated into action. Sachs tri- 
umphs over the other two men, over the original 
contempt of the girl; indeed his conversations 
with the girl will make it impossible for any 
thoughtful reader to pass them lightly. They 
reach the depths of spiritual experiences. Con- 
rad has charity for all, and immense admiration 
for Ludwig (Nietzsche) ; indeed, he says that 
Ludwig is really a Christian without knowing it, 
and that at any moment the truth may be re- 
vealed to him. For Ludwig insists that 
Strength is the highest good; Conrad merely 



300 THE ADVANCE OF 

makes an inversion, saying that Goodness is 
the highest strength. 

This is a novel where every page betrays 
cerebration; one reads it with happy atten- 
tion. And one rises from it convinced that the 
highest wisdom in life is not of the head, but 
of the heart. Seldom do we find a writer who 
combines such keen intellectual power with such 
spiritual sweetness. 

Dorothy Canfield (Mrs. J. E. Fisher), who 
took her doctor's degree at Columbia in ^'Old 
French,'' made a happy substitution in chang- 
ing her investigation from linguistics to Ameri- 
can men and women of the twentieth century. 
In The Squirrel Cage (1912) she showed in a 
straightforward narrative exactly how our mod- 
ern girls are systematically prepared for pro- 
fessional invalidism, for a long career of nerv- 
ous prostration; in Hillsboro People (1915) she 
very nearly proved the paradox that you can 
learn more about human nature in a Vermont 
village than in New York City. This book also 
exhibited her skill in the short story. It is a 
series of tales, with lyrical intermissions by 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 301 

Sarah Cleghorn, singing like linnets in the 
pauses of the wind. In her best and latest 
novel, The Bent Twig, solidly thoughtful and 
continuously interesting, we have another sound 
work of art. This time the life and ideals of a 
Middle- West State university are accurately, 
unsparingly, and affectionately portrayed. 
Dorothy Canfield is a notable addition to mod- 
ern novelists, and each of her books marks a 
steady advance. I never prophesy, for prophe- 
cies are futile; but when I finished The Bent 
Twig, my attitude toward the author was and is 
now best described by the word Faith. 



CHAPTER XI 

HENEY JAMES 

The adjective "Victorian" — tlae education of Henry James 
; — his obscurity — his model and his influence — The Ameri- 
can — Daisy Miller — the author's command of passion — a 
specialist — his verbose reticence — his uninteresting char- 
acters — his ghost-story — the beauty of his style. 

The word ^^ Victorian" as applied to literary 
standards seems to have become little more 
than a contemptuous epithet; and there is in 
fact only one designation more insulting, which 
the reader at once correctly guesses to be *^ mid- 
Victorian. '^ This twentieth-century attitude 
is rather interesting when we remember that 
there is not at this moment a single writer of 
either prose or verse in English who can com- 
pare in excellence with a half-dozen mid- Vic- 
torians that any book-lover can name. 

Henry James was born on the fifteenth of 
April, 1843, and died at his lodgings in Chelsea 
on the twenty-eighth of February, 1916. As 
literary epochs go, it is a far cry to 1843 ; and 

302 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 303 

to Americans wlio love tlieir country, and who 
hope to see it take a position in the intellectual 
.advance of humanity, it is humiliating not to 
he able to mention a single American prose 
writer born since that date who is the equal of 
the man we have lost. Of the splendid Ameri- 
can triumvirate who lived to see the new cen- 
tury, Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Henry 
James, only one is left, and he will be eighty 
years old on the first of next March. I could 
wish there were some form of literary *^ pre- 
paredness'' that would insure the United States 
a place among world powers. 

Henry James was metropolitan, cosmopoli- 
tan, international; and he, with that all but in- 
fallible correctness of taste so characteristic 
of his genius, selected for his birthplace the big 
town where all roads of the world meet — New 
York ; and for his father a man who was novel- 
ist, philosopher, theologian, and who, like 
Sainte-Beuve, passed through many intellectual 
and religious phases; regarding both life and 
death from a wide variety of mental stations, 
possibly with the hope of getting ultimately a 



304 THE ADVANCE OF 

correct parallax. Henry and his great brother 
William unconsciously received at tender age a 
prophetic impulse ; for Emerson laid his hands 
on the future philosopher, and Thackeray 
petted the future novelist. Each had in ma- 
turity something of the manner commonly as- 
sociated with the other's profession; William 
succeeded in making the reading of metaphys- 
ics easy, while Henry made novel-reading diffi- 
cult. 

Henry's education, like that of John Mill and 
Eobert Browning, was largely under the per- 
sonal supervision of his father; he was saved 
from the waste and loss of our conventional 
school system, receiving the incomparable ad- 
vantages of Europe. To be sure. Harvard has 
the right to add his name to her illustrious roll, 
for he was a student at the Law School in the 
sixties. His father never seemed to trouble 
himself as to what Henry should *^do"; like 
Goethe, he perhaps thought that it was greater 
to be than to do. No one could have looked at 
the face of Henry James when he was eighteen, 
and have felt anything akin to anxiety; it was 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 305 

a face that positively shone with intellectual 
beauty and nobility of spirit. 

From first to last he seems to have followed 
what seemed to him to be the best things in life ; 
from the year 1869 he resided chiefly in Europe, 
simply because he found there a more congenial 
mental environment, a sharper spur to artistic 
achievement. He would undoubtedly never 
have transferred his citizenship to England, 
if it had not been that England was in sore dis- 
tress; the motive guiding this transfer was 
sheerly noble. Eightly or wrongly, he believed 
with all the strength of his mind in the British 
cause, yet this did not destroy his keen sense of 
moral values, for in a letter to the writer, dated 
December 15, 1914, he said, ^' Under this huge 
nightmare, the unprecedented oppression or 
obsession of our public consciousness here, 
pleasure (save of the grim sort that premoni- 
tions of Victory, terrifically paid for, bring) is 
very hard to take and very questionable even to 
desire." Since there was considerable unfav- 
ourable American journalistic comment on his 
change of allegiance, I do not think it imperti- 



306 THE ADVANCE OF 

nent to quote a letter from an Englisli novelist ; 
*^He was a great personality in London, and 
everybody who knew him seemed to have felt his 
personal note, and of course in England we were 
so immensely touched at his becoming one of 
us in the darkest time our country has known 
for centuries. It was the most supreme proof 
he could give us of his sympathy and affection. 
But his own country must not for a moment 
think that he forgot it, for he didn't; and he left 
directions, that his ashes, after cremation, were 
to be taken back to it. There was much talk 
of a service in Westminster Abbey, the Prime 
Minister approved of it and the Dean was quite 
willing there should be one, providing the Chap- 
ter consented (which was a matter of course). 
But Mrs. William James, very wisely I think, 
refused all idea of it. The simpler service in 
the little church not a stone's throw from his 
flat, was more in accord with his life, she said, 
— ^better befitted a New Englander. So thus it 
was; and a most beautiful and dignified fare- 
well took place in the little church that is now 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 307 

centuries old and will now be forever identified 
with him.'' 

The latest thing from his pen is his beautiful 
introduction to the posthumous letters of that 
overrated poet but not overrated man, Eupert 
Brooke. It is charming to see, as in the case 
of Gray and Bonstetten, the older man of letters 
captivated by the bright, eager youth. In this 
introduction, as in everything that he wrote, 
Henry James did his best. Never was there 
perhaps a writer of higher artistic purpose. 
When The Ring and the Book appeared, a re- 
viewer remarked that Browning had done less 
to conciliate and more to influence the public 
than any of his contemporaries. The first of 
these propositions is certainly true of Henry 
James. So far as I know, he never betrayed 
any scorn for public opinion ; he simply was not 
interested. He appealed always to the select 
few, to patient readers of trained perception, 
and his natural reward was that he had the fol- 
lowers that every writer would be happy to 
claim. He never had a large public, but he en- 



308 THE ADVANCE OF 

joyed a great fame. The target at which he 
aimed was so difficult that no wonder he fre- 
quently missed; but apparently he preferred 
even to miss rather than to shoot at something 
obviously easy. He took the credit, and let the 
cash go. 

Excess of amenity will surely give a clever 
writer an immensely wide circle of readers, and 
yet the highest fame often comes to authors — 
as to statesmen — who defy the public. Lack 
of amenity may indicate a certain kind of cour- 
age, and while professional politicians are slow 
to learn it, the public really loves a display of 
courage. Browning is not always clear, but he 
is in the front rank of English poets; Haupt- 
mann's vague Sunken Bell made him a world 
figure; Maeterlinck is obscure, but prodigi- 
ously admired ; Ibsen is commonly regarded as 
the greatest of modern dramatists, and The 
Master Builder as a great play, yet no one can 
successfully demonstrate what it means. Do 
we not often reserve our highest tribute to the 
writers who refuse to help us overmuch? Per- 
haps if this is true, the reason lies in the fact 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 309 

tliat while it is pleasant to have our curiosity 
satisfied, there is one thing more stimulating 
— to have it aroused. An editorial writer on 
Henry James in The Christian Science Monitor 
summed the matter up rather neatly in one 
short sentence : '*If he was not simple, neither 
were his times. ' ' He attempted to catch shades 
of meaning that are eternally elusive, that are 
perhaps quite beyond the reach of language, or, 
at all events, the English language : 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 
Fancies that broke through language and escaped. 

Two common accusations — that he spent his 
time dealing in trivialities, and that ** nobody 
reads him'' — he admitted with cheerfulness, 
only he would have qualified the first by saying 
that he dealt in what seemed on a superficial 
glance to be trivialities. Mr. St. John Ervine 
— a novelist of marked talent — exclaimed, *'I 
cannot read the works of Henry James. He 
seems to me to spend half a lifetime in saying 
' Boo ! ' to a goose. ' ' But our author forestalled 



310 THE ADVANCE OF 

this objection long ago. So far as he had a 
model, it was the Eussian novelist Turgenev, 
and it is clear that he highly esteemed Tur- 
genev ^s praise. In his essay on Turgenev in 
Partial Portraits, he frankly confesses that the 
Eussian was unable to read most of his produc- 
tions. ^^As regards one of the first that I had 
offered him he wrote me a little note to tell me 
that a distinguished friend, who was his con- 
stant companion, had read three or four chap- 
ters aloud to him the evening before and that 
one of them was written de main de maitre. 
This gave me great pleasure, but it was my first 
and last pleasure of the kind. I continued, as 
I say, to send him my fictions, because they were 
the only thing I had to give; but he never al- 
luded to the rest of the work in question, which 
he evidently did not finish, and never gave any 
sign of having read its successors. Presently 
I quite ceased to expect this, and saw why it 
was (it interested me much), that my writings 
could not appeal to him. He cared, more than 
anything else, for the air of reality, and my 
reality was not to the purpose. I do not think 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 311 

my stories struck him as quite meat for men. 
The manner was more apparent than the mat- 
ter; they were too tarahiscote^ as I once heard 
him say of the style of a book — had on the surf- 
ace too many little flowers and knots of rib- 
bon." 

And unlike the newspapers that boast of their 
enormous circulation, Henry James seemed at 
times to be amused at the smallness of his 
audience. The prefaces that he contributed to 
the New York Edition of his works are full of 
interesting comment, and one can hardly help 
smiling at his candour in discussing the recep- 
tion accorded to The Aivkward Age, first pub- 
lished in Harper's Weekly, in the autumn of 
1898, and brought out in book form the follow- 
ing spring. '^I had meanwhile been absent 
from England, and it was not till my return, 
some time later, that I had from my publisher 
any news of our venture. But the news then 
met at a stroke all my curiosity. 'I'm sorry to 
say the book has done nothing to speak of; 
I Ve never in all my experience seen one treated 
with more general and complete disrespect.' 



312 THE ADVANCE OF 

There was thus to be nothing left me for fond 
subsequent reference — of which I doubtless 
give even now so adequate an illustration — 
save the rich reward of the singular interest 
attaching to the very intimacies of the effort/' 
Cooper was a romancer; Hawthorne an im- 
aginative realist; Mr. Howells a realist; while 
Henry James is perhaps the best example of the 
psychological realist that we have in American 
literature. After all, Henry attempted in the 
concrete what William was forever trying in the 
abstract; William was constantly illustrating 
abstract ideas by concrete selections; Henry 
constantly attempted to make his persons il- 
lustrate shades of thought. Mr. Howells, with 
that royal generosity so characteristic of him, 
has paid many a noble tribute to his contem- 
porary; but without subtracting one iota from 
Mr. Howells 's merit, it is perhaps true that the 
younger man gave more to his friend than he 
received. The dates of publication, are, at all 
events, significant. I think it is true to say 
that the finest novels of Mr. Howells were pub- 
lished in the eighties, and the finest novels of 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 313 

Henry James in the seventies. Wliat are the 
best books of the former? Am I very wide in 
naming A Modern Instance (1881-82), The Rise 
of Silas Lapham (1884-85), and Indian Sum- 
mer (1885-86)? And while the following 
choices will not please the devotee, is it not 
reasonable to select as Henry Jameses best 
titles to distinction, Roderick Hudson (1875), 
The American (1877), and Daisy Miller (1878) ? 
And if you insist on The Portrait of a Lady, let 
us remember that it was published in 1881. 
Now while we cannot definitely say that Mr. 
Howells really owes anything to Henry James, 
for Mr. Howells has always gone his own way, 
there are two distinguished moderns of whom 
we can make the assertion with more confidence 
— Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad. A 
writer has just reason to be proud of the ad- 
miration of such experts. 

There is no doubt that the *4ater manner" is 
not an impressively successful improvement on 
the earlier; the later books are not only more 
difficult reading, they do not so richly reward 
the search; and I say this despite the fact that 



314 THE ADVANCE OF 

a Boston policeman told our novelist that his 
masterpiece was The Golden Boiii. Nor can I 
believe that the revised version — any more than 
in a more sacred illustration — is an improve- 
ment on the original. (The casual reader's sus- 
picion here will be confirmed by the careful 
comparison made by Miss Clara Mclntyre.) 
For my own part, I believe that as he de- 
scended into the vale of years, Henry James 
— possibly alarmed by the prevalence of journ- 
alistic phrases — became more and more afraid 
of obvious words. This is shown by his curi- 
ous custom of placing quotation marks not 
merely around nouns, adjectives, and sentences 
immediately recognisable as current, but around 
many that have never been debased by vulgar 
use. Of course, he would now hate words like 
** message," ** reactions, '' and *^ efficiency"; but 
in the preface to the revised version of The 
Awkward Age (1908), I counted fifty instances 
that seemed to him to require quotation marks ; 
among others, *^real" talk, its appealing ^* mod- 
ernity," degree of the *^ sacrifice," on the 
'^foreign" showing. All this, of course, is not 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 315 

a new tendency; it is a development of some- 
thing discernible in his earliest work. The 
'Athenaeum calls attention to a portion of a 
phrase on the first page of his earliest fiction, 
The Story of a Year (1865)— ^^ Elizabeth (as I 
shall not scruple to call her outright) ..." 

To those who have lost their faith in Henry 
James, I can indicate a simple and all but cer- 
tain way of recapturing it. Just reread The 
American, It is a work of genius, exhibiting 
a magnificent attack on an object that only very 
gradually is seen to be impregnable. The 
cheerful, indomitably confident, generous, big- 
hearted American is fighting against a foe 
whose strength he had never even imagined: 
the French idea of the Family Unit. Paul 
Bourget in his most earnest mood, his clever 
disciple Henry Bordeaux, in the highest reaches 
of his art — neither of these Gallic novelists has 
ever approached the distinctness or the tragedy 
with which our American writer has made his 
readers see his hero's defeat. An interna- 
tional novel like The Custom of the Country 
seems positively crude in comparison with this 



316 3^HE ADVANCE OF 

masterpiece. One has only to compare the pro- 
found truth of this great work of art — the clair- 
voyance of the author in his portrayal of the 
French point of view — with hundreds of ** pa- 
triotic" works of fiction where the American 
enjoys a triumphal march across Europe, con- 
vincing both foreigners and home-bred read- 
ers that there is really no man on earth quite 
the equal of our youthful product, who com- 
bines marvellous athletic strength with chival- 
rous tenderness. 

I was only a boy when Daisy Miller ap- 
peared; but I can distinctly remember the out- 
raged cries of my elders. Daisy was **a libel 
on American womanhood." Of course, that is 
not the question; there is only one question, is 
she real? And if she had not been real, she 
could never have stirred such acrimonious de- 
bate. This book is not a novel, not primarily 
even a story; it is, as its author called it, a 
''study." It is a work of extraordinary analy- 
sis; it is really a diagnosis. The attitude of 
the author is one of strict impartiality. If in 
her freedom and innocent flirtation a ''sharp 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 317 

rebuke'' was aimed at American girls who 
travel abroad, so ber splendidly unconscious 
virginal purity might be called a rebuke to evil- 
minded, suspicious, cynical Europeanised 
Americans. Who comes off better under the 
author's exploratory operation, Daisy or Win- 
terbourne? And that last scene by the grave 
— how much the subtle Italian has to teach his 
American rival! ^*And the most innocent." 
What immeasurable scorn is conveyed in those 
words, and what echoes of vain regret are to 
reverberate in the empty, polished corridors of 
Winterbourne 's mind! 

I suppose if I should say that few modern 
writers felt the terrible passion of love more 
deeply than Henry James, I should be mentally 
contradicted by the reader. Yet I believe the 
remark to be true. Our author hated senti- 
mentality and effusiveness of speech with ab- 
horrence; but he meant thoughtful readers to 
discover through his very chariness of language 
the real depths of feeling. When Winterbourne 
asks the Italian why he took Daisy to the 
Coliseum, Giovanelli's reply, though spoken 



318 THE ADVANCE OF 

most discreetly and without raising his voice, 
means ^^ Because I had rather see her dead than 
married to you ! ' ' That the men and women in 
these novels do not indulge in verbal volcanoes 
is no sign that their insurgent hearts are not 
choking with passion. At the end of The Prin- 
cess Casamassima young Hyacinth does not 
make a ^* scene''; but when he sees the cloak- 
model in an unmistakable attitude, he simply 
goes to his room and kills himself. Did the 
hopeless young man in The Portrait of a Lady 
know the tortures of love, or did he not? Has 
any other novelist made its cruelty more ap- 
palling? And we should have to go back to 
Browning's Last Duchess to find a woman 
whose daily life was so unutterably tragic. 

Henry James was a specialist in art. Just 
as in the medical profession, we have general 
practitioners and specialists, so we find the 
same thing true in the history of fiction. Dick- 
ens was what I should call a general practi- 
tioner, handling all kinds of cases. Henry 
James was a specialist dealing with the finer 
shades of emotion, with peculiar patients suf- 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 319 

fering from a sickness quite beyond the ordi- 
nary novelist's range. He loves to isolate his 
American in a foreign environment where he 
stands out in sharper relief; if necessary, to 
darken the shadows around him, so that a pow- 
erful light may be played upon the object of the 
examination; for this reason he loved episodes 
rather than plots, sketches rather than full- 
bodied works. His own mind was so power- 
fully reflective and speculative that it would 
seem that he could not have been by nature a 
good observer; Meredith said that The Ameri- 
can Scene was simply a tour in Henry James's 
inside. Yet our author has told us in one of 
his prefaces of the innumerable hours he spent 
tramping the London streets by day and night, 
and many of his travel impressions prove that 
little escaped him. 

There are two qualities in the novels of 
Henry James that — quite apart from mere 
rhetorical difficulties — ^will probably always 
prevent his books from becoming popular. 
These are his reticence and his apparent lack 
of sympathy with his characters. There is 



320 THE ADVANCE OF 

something patrician about this reticence, some- 
thing that a great democrat like Dickens not 
only could not have practised, but could not 
have understood; for Dickens has no reserve. 
Yet it is different from conventional reticence ; 
and in an attempt to hit upon the right phrase 
to express it, I finally have decided to call the 
manner of Henry James a verbose reticence. 
All acts of the intellect and of the volition in 
the heroes and heroines of his later works are 
completely overlaid with wrappers and wrap- 
pers of language ; yet the reader in the last ex- 
tremity must always guess for himself, and 
never be quite sure that he has guessed accur- 
ately. In an honest attempt to tell us about 
the early days of his life, Henry James filled 
two fat volumes, out of which we get only a 
residuum of reliable information. This man- 
ner of course grows by what it feeds on ; and it 
has made some of the later novels — to me, in 
the present stage of my development — simply 
unreadable, dense as a star-proof thicket. And 
in connection with this fact, I may add, that 
while Henry James's style at its best is most 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 321 

happily adapted to the subject, it is humorously 
inadequate for the expression of the simplest 
and most mundane wants. In The Tragic 
Muse, when the lovers are in a positive ecstasy 
by the water-side, the woman remarks, ^^ Detach 
the boat.'' 

Nor can the ordinary reader forgive the 
author for his apparent lack of sympathy with 
his characters. Daisy dies in half a sentence; 
more space is devoted to her parasol than to 
the outcome of her illness. One has only to 
remember Thackeray's sobbing out, '*I have 
just killed Colonel Newcome," to see the im- 
mense divergence in the point of view, in the 
novelist's attitude. Henry James, like a 
severely just parent, will not permit his affec- 
tion for his literary children to obscure his 
vision of their characteristics. Indeed, I think 
in all his books, his sympathy for his men and 
women is displayed more by an intense and pro- 
found interest in all that they do and say, rather 
than by demonstrative tenderness. 

Although in real life Henry James was much 
more interested in intellectual and cultivated 



322 THE ADVANCE OF 

folk than he was in commonplace and shallow 
people, this did not narrow his work. Some of 
his finest powers of analysis — some of his most 
skilful diagnoses — are displayed on unimpor- 
tant, on uninteresting persons, if indeed there 
really be any such in the world. It is as though 
a great surgeon should devote all the assay of 
his art on hospital cases that could never pay. 
An excellent example of what I mean can be 
found in Within the Cage, where the telegraph 
girl is certainly not primarily either interest- 
ing or important — how wonderful that so 
eminent a novelist as Henry James should think 
her so supremely worth while ! Nor can I find 
the mature characters in What Maisie Knew 
really worth to the casual acquaintance more 
than a passing nod. Yet they are apparently 
deeply absorbing to the novelist, and why? 
Because they mean so much to Maisie. A 
trivial caprice in any one of them might ruin 
or glorify the whole life of the little girl. I 
admire most of all in this book the wonderful 
consistency of the point of view. It really is 
''what Maisie knew"; every character, every 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 323 

speech, is presented to the reader as it is pre- 
sented to the mind of the child. This perspec- 
tive is honestly and consistently maintained; 
and I can only applaud the intellectual vigour 
required to ^^see it through.'' 

After the unspeakable ^^kid-brother,'' Ean- 
dolph C. Miller, the one altogether unlovely, 
whose pronunciation of the dog-letter rasps our 
nerves, and who has never been house-broken, 
I did not dream until the year 1898 that our 
author could draw a winsome, lovable, charm- 
ing little boy, who would walk straight into our 
hearts. This year was a notable year in our 
writer's career; it saw the publication of The 
Turn of the Screw j which I found then and find 
again to be the most powerful, the most nerve- 
shattering ghost story I have ever read. The 
connoting strength of its author 's reticence was 
never displayed to better advantage; had he 
spoken plainly, the book might have been barred 
from the mails; yet it is a great work of art, 
profoundly ethical, and making to all those who 
are interested in the moral welfare of boys and 
girls an appeal terrific in its intensity. With 



324 THE ADVANCE OF 

none of the conventional macliinery of tlie melo- 
drama, with no background of horrible or 
threatening scenery, with no hysterical lan- 
guage, this story made my blood chill, my spine 
curl, and every individual hair to stand on end. 
When I told the author exactly how I felt while 
reading it, and thanked him for giving me sen- 
sations that I thought no author could give me 
at my age, he said that he was made happy by 
my testimony. *^For,'' said he, '*I meant to 
scare the whole world with that story; and you 
had precisely the emotion that I hoped to arouse 
in everybody. When I wrote it, I was too ill 
to hold the pen; I therefore dictated the whole 
thing to a Scot stenographer. I was glad to 
try this experiment, for I believed that I should 
be able to judge of its effect on the whole world 
by its effect on the man who should hear it 
first. Judge of my dismay when from first to 
last page this iron Scot betrayed not the slight- 
est shade of feeling! I dictated to him sen- 
tences that I thought would make him leap from 
his chair ; he short-handed them as though they 
had been geometry, aifd whenever I paused to 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 325 

see him collapse, lie would enquire in a dry 
voice, 'What nextr '' 

As the literary style of the novels of Henry 
James has often wandered into what Hawthorne 
called ^^the deep grass of latent meaning,'' I 
should like to give— even at some length — an 
example of what that style really was at its 
best, and I shall select a specimen from one of 
the novels, a specimen that shows the power of 
its author in pure description. I take a pass- 
age from the revised version of The Princess 
Vasamassima. One day in London, while talk- 
ing with Henry James, I remarked that many 
passages in Browning which seemed obscure 
to the eye became perfectly clear when read 
aloud intelligently, and with the proper distri- 
bution of emphasis. To my great surprise, he 
whispered in my ear — there were others in the 
room — this statement, whispered with intense 
earnestness : ''I have never in my life written 
a sentence that I did not mean to be read aloud, 
that I did not specifically intend to meet that 
test; you try it and see. Only don't you tell." 
I am sure that he will not mind now my calling 



326 THE ADVANCE OF 

attention to this remark, because, if people who 
really know how to read aloud will try pages 
from his novels here and there, the result will 
often demonstrate their beauty, a beauty not al- 
ways otherwise suspected. In order to enjoy 
the following selection, one must be not only a 
sincere lover of rural scenes, one must love na- 
ture partly for its human associations, with 
something of the unspeakable affection that 
Englishmen have for country ^ ^ places ' ' hallowed 
by generations of men and women. And the 
reader must try to see this vernal beauty with 
the eyes of young Hyacinth, who was as sensi- 
tive to loveliness as Keats, and who had not 
guessed there was much in life except the sordid 
squalor of the slums. 

*' Hyacinth got up early ... an operation 
attended with very little effort, as he had scarce 
closed his eyes all night. What he saw from 
his window made him dress as quickly as a 
young man might who desired more than ever 
that his appearance shouldn't give strange ideas 
about him: an old garden with parterres in 
curious figures and little intervals of lawn that 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 327 

seemed to our hero's cockney vision fantasti- 
cally green. At one end of the garden was a 
parapet of mossy brick which looked down on 
the other side into a canal, a moat, a qnaint old 
pond (he hardly knew what to call it) and from 
the same standpoint showed a considerable part 
of the main body of the house — Hyacinth's room 
belonging to a wing that commanded the ex- 
tensive irregular back — which was richly grey 
wherever clear of the ivy and the other dense 
creepers, and everywhere infinitely a picture: 
with a high-piled ancient russet roof broken by 
huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all 
manner of odd gables and windows on different 
lines, with all manner of antique patches and 
protrusions and with a particularly fascinating 
architectural excrescence where a wonderful 
clock-face was lodged, a clock-face covered with 
gilding and blazonry but showing many traces 
of the years and the weather. He had never in 
his life been in the country — the real country, 
as he called it, the country which was not the 
mere ravelled fringe of London — and there en- 
tered through his open casement the breath of 



328 THE ADVANCE OF 

a world enchantingly new and after his recent 
feverish hours unspeakably refreshing; a sense 
of sweet sunny air and mingled odours, all 
strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical 
silence that consisted for the greater part of 
the voices of many birds. There were tall quiet 
trees near by and afar off and everywhere ; and 
the group of objects that greeted his eyes evi- 
dently formed only a corner of larger spaces 
and of a more complicated scene. There was 
a world to be revealed to him: it lay waiting 
with the dew on it under his windows, and he 
must go down and take- of it such possession as 
he might. 

^*He rambled an hour in breathless ecstasy, 
brushing the dew from the deep fern and 
bracken and the rich borders of the garden, 
tasting the fragrant air and stopping every- 
where, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of 
some exquisite impression. His whole walk 
was peopled with recognitions; he had been 
dreaming all his life of just such a place and 
such objects, such a morning and such a chance. 
It was the last of April and everything was 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL 329 

fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the early 
air, were a blur of tender shoots. Bound the 
admirable house he revolved repeatedly, catch- 
ing every aspect and feeling every value, feast- 
ing on the whole expression. . . . There was 
something in the way the grey walls rose from 
the green lawn that brought tears to his eyes ; 
the spectacle of long duration unassociated 
with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new 
to him; he had lived with people among whom 
old age meant for the most part a grudged and 
degraded survival. In the favoured resistance 
of Medley was a serenity of success, an accum- 
ulation of dignity and honour." 

Although there is little to report of external 
interest in the career of Henry James, I sus- 
pect few moderns have obtained more out of the 
precious gift of life than he. He lived keenly, he 
lived abundantly ; and in his brave explorations 
on the frontiers of human thought and passion, 
I think he found many thrilling experiences, as 
thrilling as those of Drake and Columbus on 
uncharted seas., There is a memorable sen- 
tence in The Sacred Fount , a novel, that I sus- 



330 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

pect he meant as an Apologia. *'For real ex- 
citement there are no such adventures as intel- 
lectual ones." 



INDEX 



[Only important references are given; the mere mention of 
names is omitted.] 

Addison, J., a realist, 29; his Browning, R., compared with 

style, 33; Spectator, 34, ^- ' ' -i- - -- 

57. 
Ade, G., Fahles, 282. 
Allen, J. L., 268-271. 
Atherton, Mrs. G., 290. 
Austen, J., defence of novels, 

8; Northanger Ahhey, 88, 

89 ; praises Grandison, 

89; Pride and Prejudice, 

91, 92, 121; Persuasion, 
93 ; Elizabeth Bennett, 

92, 97, 98; place in fic- 
tion, 118. 



Richardson, 48, 51; My 

Last Duchess, 115. 
Bunyan, J., Mr. Badman, 35. 
Bulwer-Lytton, E., choice of 

Scott's novels, 101. 
Burton, R., Anatomy, 57; his 

love of coarse fun, 68; 

influence on Sterne, 74. 
Butler, S., Way of All Flesh, 

232-241. 



Balzac, H., Pere Goriot, 26; 
compared with Smollett, 
70. 

Barclay, Mrs. F., The Rosary, 
77. 

Barrie, J. M., 223-225. 

Bashford, H. H., 264. 

Bellamy, E., 13. 

B|M>ett, A., 156-159. 

Blsrekmore, R. D., Lorna 
Doone, 19, 20, 23, 45. 

Boyesen, H., remark on Mid- 
dlemarch, 114. 

Bradshaigh, Lady, corre- 
spondence with Richard- 
son, 60, 76. 

Bronte, A., Agnes Grey, 118. 

Bronte, C, 118-121. 

Bronte, E., Wuthering 

Heights, 118, 119. 



331 



Canfield, D. (Mrs. Fisher), 
300. 

Cholmondeley, M., 262. 

Churchill, W., Inside of the 
Cup, 4, 14; Richard Car- 
vel, 148; general crit- 
icism, 273-277. 

Clifford, Mrs. W. K., Love 
Letters of a Worldly 
Woman, 261. 

Collins. W., Woman in White, 
104, 121; his work, 121- 
123. 

Conrad, J., 192-217. 

Cooper, J. F., compared with 
Richardson, 55; his hero- 
ines, 94, 96, 97; his vi- 
tality, 102, 103; com- 
pared with Conrad, 211. 

Cowley, A., master of prose, 
30; specimen of his style, 
32; personal essays, 57. 



332 



INDEX 



Cross, W. L., authority on 
Sterne, 73; remark on 
Sandford and Merton, 97. 

Davis, E. H., Soldiers of For- 
tune, 94; short stories, 
129. 

Day, T.*, Sandford and Mer- 
ton, 97. 

Defoe, D., a realist, 29; his 
work, 35-40. 

De Morgan, W., 154-156. 

Dickens, C, his early fame, 
44 ; David Copperfield, 
45; relation to Smollett, 
69, 70; his works, 104- 
110; compared with Con- 
rad, 215; compared with 
James, 318. 

Dostoevski, F., compared with 
Dickens, 107, 108. 

Doyle, C, popularity, 123; 
foresaw romantic move- 
ment, 146. 

Dryden, J., learned from 
Cowley, 31, 33. 

Dumas (p&re), his vitality, 
102, 103. 

Eggleston, E., The Hoosier 
Schoolmaster, 282. 

"Eliot, G.," 104-115; Silas 
Earner, 121, 124. 

Ervine, St. John, Mrs. Mar- 
tin's Man, 38, 266; Alice 
and a Family, 266; crit- 
icism of James, 309. 

Farnol, J., an anachronism, 
151. 

Fielding, H., 46-64. 

Ford, P. L., The HonoraUe 
Peter Stirling, 148; Jan- 
ice Meredith, 148. 



Galsworthy, J., praise of 
Conrad, 202; his work, 
217-223. 

Gay, J., his epitaph, 74. 

Goethe, J. W., Wilhelm Meis- 
ter, 7, 8; Werther, 76. 

Goldsmith, 0., Vicar of Wake- 
field, 71, 72. 

Gosse, E., prediction of ro- 
mantic revival, 141. 

Gray, T., criticism of Joseph 
Andrews, 62-64; admira- 
tion for Castle of Otranto, 
86. 

Hardy, T., his work, 187- 
191; Meredith's comment 
on, 173. 

Harland, H., 272. 

Harrison, H. S., 285-290. 

Harte, B., 126, 127. 

Hawthorne, N., contrasted 
with Cooper, 55; his nov- 
els, 105; short stories, 
126. 

"Henry, 0.," 127-129. 

Herrick, R., 284. 

"Hope, A.," 6, 143, 146. 

Howells, W. D., contempt for 
romance, 20, 143; Mod- 
ern Instance, 110; his re- 
mark on Real Life, 154; 
his best novels, 313. 

Hugo, v., romanticism, 36, 
80; his vitality, 102. 

Hutchinson, A. S. M., 265. 

Irving, W., 124. 

James, W., attitude toward 
the novel, 8-10; remark 
on American convention, 
132; Turn of the Screw, 
144, 324; criticism of 
Meredith, 168; his work, 



INDEX 



333 



302-330; blessed by Em- 
erson, 304 ; compared 
with Henry, 304, 312. 

Johnson, S., Rasselas, 70, 71; 
contrasted with Gold- 
smith, 72. 

Johnston, M., To Have and to 
Hold, 149. 

Kingsley, C, Hypatia and 
Westward Ho, 104, 110. 

Kipling, K., popularity in 
Russia, 108; superiority 
of his earlier work, 268. 

Leacock, S., defence of im- 
aginative work, 10. 

Leiand, T., Longsicord, 82-84. 

Lewes, G. H., remark on 
Daniel Deronda, 114. 

Lewis, S., Trail of the Hawk, 
66. 

Locke, W. J., 256-260. 

London, J., 283. 

Lounsbury, T. R., remark on 
Cooper, 94. 

Mackenzie, H., 3Ian of Feel- 
ing, 77. 
Major, C, When Knighthood 

Was in Flower, 147. 
Malory, T., Morte d' Arthur, 

29, 30. 
Marshall, A., 116, 117. 
Maupassant, G. de, compared 

with Sterne, 75. 
Maxwell, W. B., In Cotton 

Wool, 262, 
Meredith, G., 163-187. 
Merrick, L., 263. 
Milton, J., prose style, 31. 
Moore, G., Esther Waters, 

24; his work, 246-251. 
Moulton, R. G., remark on 

novel-readers, 45. 



Nicholson, W., discovery 
about Defoe, 39, 40. 

Oliphant, Mrs., remark on in- 
decency, 67. 

Ollivant, A., Bol, Son of Bat- 
tle, 260. 

Phillpotts, E., 242-246. 
Poe, E. A., 124, 125; popular- 
ity in Russia, 130. 
Porter, G. S., 78. 
Porter, S. {see "O. Henry"). 

Radcliffe, Mrs., Mysteries of 
Udolpho, 87, 89. 

Raleigh, Prof. W., his Eng- 
lish Novel, 44. 

Reade, C, Christie Johnstone, 
95; Cloister and the 
Hearth, 110. 

Reeve, C, novel and ro- 
mance, 18; praise of 
Longsivord, 83; Old Eng- 
lish Baron, 87. 

Richardson, S., 43-62; senti- 
mentalism, 75-77; his in- 
fluence, 79, 80; praised 
by Jane Austen, 89. 

Rolland, R., Jean-Christophe, 
160. 

Rousseau, J. J., admiration 
for Richardson, 54; in- 
spired by Richardson, 76. 

Saintsbury, G., five marriage- 
able novel-heroines, 98 ; 
prediction of romantic 
revival, 140. 

Scott, W., 98-102; popular- 
ity in Russia, 108; Zo- 
la's remark on, 134. 

Sedgwick, A. (Mrs. de 
(S^lincourt), 297-300. 



334 



INDEX 



Shakespeare, W., borrowed 
plots, 6; popularity in 
Russia, 108. 

Shaw, G. B., Cashel Byron's 
Profession, 241. 

Sienkiewicz, H., his vitality, 
102; his romances, 151- 
153. 

Sinclair, M., 225-230. 

Smollett, T., 65-72; Ferdi- 
nand, Count Fathom, 82. 

Sterne, L., 65-74; his senti- 
mentalism, 76, 77, 107. 

Stevenson, R. L., aim of ro- 
mance, 22; relation to 
Defoe, 39; Treasure Is- 
land, 45, 46, 136, 137; 
criticism of Scott, 99, 
100; St. Ives and Weir of 
Hermiston, 110; his sig- 
nificance, 135-140; supe- 
riority to Scott, 138; let- 
ter to Barrie, 223. 

Stewart, C. D., 271. 

Stockton, F., 149, 150. 

Swift, J., a realist, 29; his 
style, 33; Gulliver, 42, 
43; his epitaph, 75. 

Tarkington, B., compared 
with Jane Austen, 93; 
Gentleman from Indiana 
and Beaucaire, 149; his 
work, 277-281. 

Tennyson, A,, criticised by 
Meredith, 182. 

Thackeray, W- M., Esmond, 
17, 98, 104, 111; disciple 
of Fielding, 55, 69; his 
work, 104-112. 



Tolstoi, L., dislike of Shake- 
speare, 6 ; reality of Anna 
Karenina, 59 ; short 
stories, 130. 

Trollope, A., Dr. Thome, 59; 
his work, 115, 116. 

Turgenev, I., short stories, 
130; praised by James, 
310. 

"Twain, M.," his dislike of 
Vicar of Wakefield, 72; 
praise of Quentin Dur- 
ward, 100. 

Viele, H. K., 271. 

Walpole, H., Castle of Otran- 
to, 84-86. 

Ward, Mrs. H., David 
Grieve, 14; Robert Els- 
mere, 14. 

Wells, H. G., popularity in 
Russia, 108; Tono-Bun- 
gay, 159; his work, 252- 
256. 

Weyman, S., 144, 145. 

Wharton, Mrs. E., Fruit of 
the Tree, 15; her work, 
293-297. 

White, W. A., A Certain Rich 
Man, 159. 

Wilde, O., popularity of in 
Russia, 108; comparison 
of Meredith and Brown- 
ing, 182. 

Wilkins, M. (Mrs. Freeman), 
291-293. 

Willcocks, M. P., 230, 231. 

Zola, E., 133-135. 



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